One of my nearest-field memories from life before 9/11 is a conversation some weeks earlier with an audio engineer who was working on a waveform recognition algorithm for Nokia. You might presume a person in that field, at that time, would be working on features like voice commands for smartphones, but he was actually working on a formula to identify any piece of recorded music based on fifteen contiguous seconds of digital information. This was considered a game-changer in the oncoming digital audio war, and something of a unicorn due to three major barriers: computing overhead, application packaging, and the evolving use of digital signal processing (digitally-modified wave-forms are less distinct, so differential algorithms have to work harder to identify them).
As processing power improved year over year in the 2000s, and digital storage prices crashed, on-the-fly music recognition became more feasible. Yet people had little use for the technology, because there was no platform it could be carried on, for use when you needed it (in the car, at the bar, in the club, at the party). Apple’s iPhone worked as the conduit for this and so many other data-mining concepts, and one of the most popular apps for all smartphones today is Shazam, which uses aspects of the technology my friend helped Nokia patent.
Shazam cheats the programmatic difficulty of identifying songs by relying on horsepower to heuristically and sequentially build matches for each section of music, then fit them together like LEGO, until the application reaches an actionable level of confidence in its match. It’s not perfect, but perfection in this realm is probably unattainable. Which is a larger conversation for larger brains. The picture above is of a cuddly bunny.
MiniDisc was one of the biggest calamities in format-war history, part of a pattern of behavior exhibited by its developer, Sony. No company has adopted more brutal and impractical protectionist policies with respect to its proprietary formats than Sony, and anecdotal evidence suggests their mania here is down to internal dissatisfaction over credit for — and control over — the dominant format of the last twenty years, the Compact Disc. The result of an often-contentious collaboration with Philips, Compact Disc technology was poorly controlled from an intellectual property and copyright perspective, and Sony sought to solidify its position with Digital Audio Tape (DAT).
Introduced in 1987, DAT was a considerable technical feat, offering source-signal flexibility and lossless, infinite reproducibility. CBS Records hauled the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in front of Congress over the latter feature, terrified at what DAT would mean for record sales. Sponsored by a young Al Gore, the Digital Audio Recorder Act of 1987 sought to impose an absurd level of copy protection on the format. If passed, this legislation would have compelled Sony to re-engineer its entire product line, soldering a microchip onto the motherboard of every DAT player to detect commercially-manufactured cassettes, and horrendously distort the signal to the dub. Sony responded in early 1988 by buying CBS Records and killing the law in committee. Sadly, the word “balla” was unavailable to properly mark the occasion.
DAT is the best audio format ever brought to market, and its failure in the retail sphere brings us back to Sony’s obstinate single-mindedness. Despite their Machiavellian play, copyright concerns over lossless duplication and the visible digital future persisted. In 1990, the RIAA issued a standing public threat to sue any retailer who offered DAT recorders until a copy protection methodology they signed off on was in place. As margins in audio gear — particular high-end stuff like DAT — are razor-thin, nobody would stock them. It would be two years before this stalemate was resolved, in sloppy, oft-forgotten — but unbelievably still binding — Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. This addressed a series of protracted artist lawsuits around royalty frameworks, and formalized RIAA acceptance of DAT, thanks to the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS), a simpler method by which retail DAT tapes infect copies with a trigger bit that blocks additional duplication.
For four years, Sony never prioritized development of SCMS, or lawyer-ed up to call the RIAA’s bluff, because DAT was already DOA. It wasn’t failing to find adoption because of artist resistance, or corporate copyright paranoia, or any confusing new features. Due to their equally arrogant and monopolistic belief in DAT as a market-cornering golden goose, and their bitterness over losing control of the Compact Disc, Sony had never considered partnering with another manufacturer, a company outside Japan where they could shift production to offset potentially fluctuating costs. Because only Sony made DAT players, nobody could afford them.
In early 1985, when Sony first committed to DAT as a retail format, the Japanese Yen traded at ¥239 to $1, and a DAT player was forecast to cost just under $400, square with aspirational yuppie toys like the LaserDisc, and whatever else decorated Patrick Bateman’s apartment in American Psycho. That September, one of the most insane pieces of economic policy on record was enacted: the Plaza Accord, which essentially re-balanced every major world currency to give America a decisive trade advantage. The Plaza Accord was so debilitating for Japan (among other countries) that it was for all intents reversed two years later, in the Louvre Accord. By the time DAT came to market in 1987, a basic home player cost $800, and player/recorders were $1200.
There is no denying DAT’s technical superiority, but that superiority required very new and expensive technology, and while it could be argued that a corporation of Sony’s stature should have anticipated inflationary pressures, nobody could have predicted the Plaza Accord.
Crippled as an exporter, and shouldering a technology the American entertainment industry had selected for crucifixion, Sony let DAT drift into the professional sphere, focusing on a more affordable and flexible format for the digital age: the MiniDisc. While wildly successful in Japan for over ten years, MiniDisc barely cracked — let alone cornered — the consumer audio market.
MiniDisc’s middling U.S. performance was initially overshadowed by the Hatfield to Sony’s McCoy: Philips, who in 1992 brought out the worst audio format of all time to compete with MiniDisc: the Digital Compact Cassette. It has been more technologically and economically useful producing beer than reproducing music.
From the introduction of the TPS-L2 Walkman on July 1st, 1979, Sony brought out more than two hundred iterations of its portable cassette player. Most consumers never realized the entire run was based on just three distinct chassis: the WM-2, the WM-DD, and the WM-20. Nearly 90% of Sony Walkmans were purely cosmetic refinements of these platforms. In some instances, new models passed the break-even mark at an unheard-of twenty thousand units.
The Walkman is one of the definitive examples of platform design, a triumph often cited in academic and business circles. Susan Sanderson and Mustafa Uzumeri’s 1994 case study, published in Elsevier’s Research Policy, is the reference work here. Throughout the 1980s, Sony was what Apple is today: the most trusted and admired brand in the world, boasting a perceived and heavily marketed technical superiority embodied in its forward-thinking industrial designs. And like Apple, Sony enjoyed sinister economic advantage.
Over the last ten years, Cupertino has outflanked musicians and the music industry, reducing both to content in its distribution scheme, and forcing artists and publishers to accept pitiful royalty rates for access to its herd. The Walkman worked similarly as a Trojan Horse for the compact cassette. In 1963, Sony engineered a remarkably brutal deal with Philips, who had just unveiled the compact cassette in Berlin. Playing them against faltering Grundig, who were willing to gift their DC-International format in exchange for global market access, Sony correctly estimated that neither manufacturer could realistically market a consumer electronics product beyond Europe.
Using Grundig’s desperation and their near-total control of the Japanese market as leverage, Sony convinced Philips to grant them free license to manufacture and market compact cassettes in Japan. This concession made all future royalty discussions moot, and Philips formally capitulated in 1965, making the compact cassette a royalty-free format to all manufacturers. Cassettes were then a zero-cost medium for Sony, who inserted themselves as middle-man in the successful marketing of “tapes” as a consumer convenience.
MiniDisc was charged with replacing the Walkman for the digital age. At launch, in November 1992, Sony didn’t even bring out a home stereo component, only the portable MZ-1. The format faced a number of barriers to adoption. First, it was an entirely new ecosystem, and as Sony had borne the vast majority of development and manufacturing costs, hardware was prohibitively expensive. The MZ-1 was a $700 tank, weighing as much as three Walkmans, though build quality was staggeringly good for a first-generation optical device. I bought one used from a friend in 1996, and it worked perfectly for another ten years.
On top of cost concerns, MiniDisc was developed during Sony’s controversial purchase of CBS Records in the late 1980s, and nobody was interested in helping them establish a single-channel manufacturing and publishing stranglehold on the music industry. Initially, only a few dozen retail titles were available, all from Sony’s subsidiary imprints. Mariah Carey was their marquee launch artist; throughout 1992, her image was deeply tied to MiniDisc.
Philips still had a dog in this hunt, though the operative word there is dog. Digital Compact Cassette was one of the worst formats ever introduced. The marketing thrust at launch was its backward-compatibility, which is never a good sign. Philips’ approach was pragmatic — they were looking to bridge the booming cassette market with the oncoming digital revolution — but DCC proved technically and commercially sexless next to Sony, who as usual thought in terms of novelty, which is always the better enticement to adoption. Sony’s tech remains questionable — lossy ATRAC compression, a rudimentary metadata implementation prone to corruption — but there was little doubt the company would come out on top in this format war, though few could say what that would look like.
Retail cassette sales peaked in the late 1980s at about fifty million units per year, having overtaken vinyl in 1984. Sony’s Walkman was in no small part to thank for its rise, yet the corporation was convinced cassettes would quickly fall from favor once digital sound quality gained traction with consumers. Sony had shown their hand with DAT, but happened upon two major user improvements by way of magneto-optical storage.
The first was an independent, editable metadata table, allowing for customization of track and disc names, and more importantly, instant track selection. By aliasing the location of the audio data to a pointer in a fixed table, as per computer hard drives, MiniDisc provided faster seek times than Compact Disc, and nanosecond track gaps. Gescom’s famed MiniDisc exploited this, and was designed to play seamlessly in shuffle mode.
Second and most significantly, MiniDisc allowed for a large data buffer, caching ten or more seconds of music ahead of playback. With this safety net, and the MD’s tamper-proof plastic shell, Sony could offer better sound quality, flexibility, and durability than the cassette, and conquer the skipping stigma that dogged portable CD players, like their market-leading Discman.
Employing the same platform methodology that had worked for the Walkman, Sony refined the MiniDisc player, and by the time its cubic core chassis was established in 1996, dozens of inexpensive cosmetic variations, with differing control and display layouts, saturated the Japanese market. Sony threw out all the rules here, giving rise to some of the most aesthetically beautiful and apoplectically confusing portable audio players the world has known.
The allure of chocolate-bar smartphones and even the iPad is their sleek minimalism; the wow-factor today is killer apps and content, and we are left with boring, functional industrial design. The MiniDisc was music’s last gasp of object fun, and all those wacky, early MP3 players are testament to how deeply Sony’s artistic anarchy had penetrated the ideological marketplace. MiniDisc’s success in Japan through the mid-2000s is often stereotypically attributed to a broader fascination with smart design.
MiniDisc had most of the ‘90s to itself, yet it never really took off — not like the Walkman had in the ‘80s, anyway. Ex-Japanese consumer disinterest — or perhaps better-put, consumer satisfaction with Compact Disc and cassettes — was clearly a factor, but Sony were squarely to blame on the market side, because the corporation grievously underestimated how quickly CD-Rs would drop in price. Above all, MiniDisc failed because it because it was simultaneously less functional and more expensive than recordable CDs.
In 1992, CD-Rs cost $15 each. Sony forecast that over the next five years, they would fall to $5 per disc, still more than double the cost of a MiniDisc. By 1998, wholesale CD-Rs cost less than a dollar. They may have scratched, or skipped, but at eighty cents a pop, nobody cared about CD-R’s failings. Despite hastily-added PC connectivity (acquired for a princely sum from gonzo Australian firm Xitel), the MiniDisc’s only avantage over CD-R — two and four-hour extended-play modes — delivered terribly compromised sound quality.
At a marketplace disadvantage to CD-R, and staring down the wide-open digital future promised by iRiver and Apple’s iPod, there was never a gap for MiniDisc to fill. Ultimately, digital distribution was more practical than any physical media, and by the turn of the century, became the obvious endgame for popular music.