Just as the introduction of the audiocassette rejuvenated the record industry in the 1960s/70s, the Compact Disc (also known as CD-DA or Compact Disc -Digital Audio) developed by Philips and Sony and commercially released in 1983, revolutionised the industry in the 1980s. During the format's first year of release in the US, 30 000 CD players were sold, and a total of 800 000 CDs, despite a lack of titles available to consumers. Within three years of release, sales of CD players rose to 3 million, with CD sales reaching 53 million units.[9]

The CD format was made possible due to technological advances in digital recording and the computerisation of the recording industry. Digital recording became commonplace because of its ease of editing and data manipulation, and as technology improved and prices dropped, similar digital technology was introduced into the consumer market . Music on a CD takes the form of digital data in a binary code rather than as an analogue signal, and this development revolutionised the music industry more radically than at any time since the introduction of electrical recording in the 1920s.

As with any other music format developments, there were new advantages to attract the consumer to the product, and the CD offered more than previous formats - clearer sound quality, random and immediate access to individual tracks resulting in a tracklisting chosen by the consumer rather than the industry, a continuous flow of music with no interruptions from turning over the disc to access more music, and a promised "indestructible" format with no loss of sound quality over time.

The success of the Compact Disc led to the development of other, similar formats, many of which were adopted by the music industry to help promote artists and their products in the new digital age.

• CD-ROM (Compact Disc -Read Only Memory) - Mainly used by the computer industry to store larger amounts of data than is physically possible on a 3.5" floppy disk (up to 650Mb as opposed to only 1.6Mb on a floppy disk), CD -ROMS can therefore contain multimedia as text, graphics, sound and video - files which are usually too large to include on a single floppy disk. CD -ROMs also differ from floppy disks in that they are an optical rather than magnetic format, and are a read-only format and cannot be adapted or changed by the consumer.
  
  
• CD-I (Compact Disc -Interactive) - a consumer electronics format from which multimedia data is accessed by a standalone CD -I player (i.e. requires no external computer) which is connected to a TV and stereo system. The CD -I player will also play standard audio CDs, without the added text, graphics and video which is included on a CD -I disc. [10]
  
  
• Enhanced CD - Also known as a multisession CD, the Enhanced CD is one of the most recent developments in digital technology that has been embraced by the music industry. An Enhanced CD combines normal CD audio tracks with CD -ROM data on a single disc. The audio tracks can be played on conventional CD players that ignore the data track, while both the music and multimedia data can be read by a multimedia personal computer.[11] The Enhanced CD standard was specified by Sony and Philips and was developed in conjunction with Microsoft, and is an important development in that it was the first significant partnership between the music and computer industries.

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