Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and a love
Speaker 1: things tech. And we are continuing our epic series about
Speaker 1: the evolution of media, of recorded media specifically and our
Speaker 1: relationship with it and how that has changed over the years.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, I started with the earliest days
Speaker 1: of consumer media, stuff like wax cylinders. By earliest days,
Speaker 1: I mean like media you could play back and experience,
Speaker 1: not stuff like sheet music or or written plays or
Speaker 1: things like that. And we're gonna be leading all the
Speaker 1: way up to today's streaming formats in this series. And
Speaker 1: in our last episode, I covered the birth of the
Speaker 1: video cassette, and I talked about the very early days
Speaker 1: of the compact disc. But I want to folk it's
Speaker 1: more on CDs in this episode because they are very important. Uh.
Speaker 1: They played a big part in sort of the transformation
Speaker 1: of music. So in order for us to understand the
Speaker 1: era of digital files and then eventually the the migration
Speaker 1: to streaming services, we have to understand more about c
Speaker 1: d s. And I talked a bit about the development
Speaker 1: of the c D standard, the compact disc standard, and
Speaker 1: the format of the compact disc in that last episode,
Speaker 1: and how the Audio CD debuted on the market way
Speaker 1: back in n two. But I should give a bit
Speaker 1: more background on some of those standards. I mentioned that
Speaker 1: the alleged reason that compact discs measure twelve centimeters in
Speaker 1: diameter is because an executive at Sony felt a single
Speaker 1: compact disc should be able to fit a full recording
Speaker 1: of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on it. Sony had partnered with
Speaker 1: the company Phillips on developing this compact disc standard, and
Speaker 1: Phillips owned a subsidiary, uh and it was PolyGram Records.
Speaker 1: So PolyGram Records is music label. And the longest recording
Speaker 1: of Beethoven's Ninth that was in PolyGram's catalog was seventy
Speaker 1: four minutes long. So to fit seventy four minutes of
Speaker 1: audio on a compact disc using the standards they had
Speaker 1: arrived at would require a disc of at least twelve
Speaker 1: centimeters in diameter. Now again I said the beginning of
Speaker 1: all that allegedly because sometimes these things just turn out
Speaker 1: to be legends and not actually true, And I honestly
Speaker 1: don't know if that legend is true or not. It
Speaker 1: may well be. I hope it is. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a cool little way of saying that's why c d
Speaker 1: s are the size that they are. Now, it wasn't
Speaker 1: just music that determined that size, right, It wasn't just
Speaker 1: the fact that Beethoven's Symphony is seventy four minutes, because
Speaker 1: why did seventy four minutes take up that much space
Speaker 1: as opposed to less space or more space? Well, the
Speaker 1: sample rate and the bit encoding played a big part
Speaker 1: in that. So sample rate refers to how many times
Speaker 1: you measure something, how many measurements you're taking per unit
Speaker 1: of time, And in this case with audio, uh, we're
Speaker 1: talking about measuring some sort of level of audio energy
Speaker 1: per unit of time. Frequency is typically what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: So the more times you sample audio per second, the
Speaker 1: closer the recording will resemble the original audio, And each
Speaker 1: sample has a certain amount of data associated with it.
Speaker 1: The more samples you take per second, the more data
Speaker 1: you're going to have to represent whatever it is that
Speaker 1: you've measured. So with audio CDs, Sony and Phillips decide
Speaker 1: on a sample rate of forty four point one killer hurts.
Speaker 1: That's forty four thousand, one hundred samples per second. So
Speaker 1: why forty four point one killer hurts? Why arrive at
Speaker 1: that number? Was it arbitrary? Well, and now it has
Speaker 1: to do with something called the Nyquist rate. So Harry
Speaker 1: Nyquist was an electric electronic engineer and he studied signal processing,
Speaker 1: and his work was what prompted the adoption of the
Speaker 1: term niquist rate and niquist limit um. So this explains
Speaker 1: a phenomena. It says that for any finite bandwidth signal,
Speaker 1: you need to sample the signal at twice the frequency
Speaker 1: range of that signal in order to capture all of
Speaker 1: the information represented within it. So if a signals frequency,
Speaker 1: let's don't worry about audio. Just say that you've got
Speaker 1: some sort of signal, and you say you've got a
Speaker 1: frequency that ranges from ten killer hurts to sixty killer hurts.
Speaker 1: The full range of frequencies there is fifty kill hurts
Speaker 1: right ten to sixty that's a fifty killer hurts range.
Speaker 1: To sample that bandwidth and to get all the information
Speaker 1: that is associated with that signal so that you're you're
Speaker 1: not losing anything, you would need a sample rate of
Speaker 1: at least one hundred killer hurts. That's twice the frequency range.
Speaker 1: The range was fifty, you double that. That's a hunry
Speaker 1: killer hurts. That's your niquist rate. But how do you
Speaker 1: come up with a single standard sampling rate for all
Speaker 1: audio recording? After all, a complex, nuanced piece of music
Speaker 1: there has a lot of very low pitch, very high
Speaker 1: pitch music in it could have a much greater range
Speaker 1: of frequencies than a simple pop song. And that's not
Speaker 1: me putting down pop music. I happen to love pop music.
Speaker 1: But how do you apply one set of rules to
Speaker 1: all music? Well, Sony and Phillips engineers agreed on forty
Speaker 1: four point one killer hurts because we generally say that
Speaker 1: the range of human hearing goes from twenty hurts to
Speaker 1: twenty killer hurts. So, in other words, any sounds that
Speaker 1: have a frequency below twenty hurts are too low pitch
Speaker 1: for us to hear, and any sounds with a frequency
Speaker 1: higher than twenty killer hurts are too high pit for
Speaker 1: us to hear. So a CDs sample rate is forty
Speaker 1: four point one killer hurts to be able to capture
Speaker 1: all the perceptible information in an audio piece with a
Speaker 1: little bit of wiggle room. But that's just part of
Speaker 1: the picture. Sure, we're measuring audio at forty four thousand,
Speaker 1: one times per second. But another thing we have to
Speaker 1: think about is how detailed are we getting with those measurements.
Speaker 1: Sony and Phillips decided on a sixteen bit audio bit
Speaker 1: depth that gives us sixty five thousand, five hundred thirty
Speaker 1: six possible ways to describe the audio energy in a
Speaker 1: sound file. So, in other words, you have that many
Speaker 1: degrees to describe the sound in in terms of its frequency.
Speaker 1: And uh, obviously the more degrees you have, the more
Speaker 1: precise you can be with that measurement. So it's pretty precise.
Speaker 1: It's it's not you know, it's not flawless, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty precise. Now, if we do a bit of math,
Speaker 1: we see that the bit rate or amount of information
Speaker 1: we need to describe the audio ends up being one
Speaker 1: point three five megabits per second. Now that's megabits, not megabytes. Remember,
Speaker 1: a bit is a single unit of information. It's either
Speaker 1: a zero or a one, whereas a byte is a
Speaker 1: collection of eight bits. Okay, so one point three five
Speaker 1: megabits per second is what we get for sixteen bit
Speaker 1: audio sampled at forty four point one killer hurts or
Speaker 1: Cede equality. That means a minute of stereo audio ends
Speaker 1: up being about ten megabytes of information storage space. So
Speaker 1: the amount of data per second, coupled with the total
Speaker 1: storage time is what dictated the CD form factor. Also,
Speaker 1: these were standards for consumer compact discs and compact displayers.
Speaker 1: In the professional audio world, the sampling rate for recording
Speaker 1: and duplicating tends to be forty eight killer hurts or higher,
Speaker 1: and that generates way more data per second than the
Speaker 1: lower sampling rates. But that was for the professional processing
Speaker 1: as opposed to consumer grade c d s and CD players. Also,
Speaker 1: this is a really good reminder that digital formats are
Speaker 1: inherently different from analog formats. In analog, you don't slice
Speaker 1: up the audio energy levels like you do with digital.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a seamless experience, at least to human perception.
Speaker 1: It's seamless. So with digital, you're taking what seems to
Speaker 1: be a smooth, unbroken sound, and effectively you're chopping it
Speaker 1: up and describing it at each instance for a certain
Speaker 1: number of instances per second. In this case, but these
Speaker 1: sections are so small that to us, to our perception,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really sound chopped up at all, at least
Speaker 1: if if you're doing the whole thing correctly, it doesn't
Speaker 1: sound chopped up. Still, this approach meant that audio files
Speaker 1: who swear by vinyl would often reject the very concept
Speaker 1: of digital music. There are those who argue that because
Speaker 1: CDs have a sample rate at all means they cannot
Speaker 1: possible capture all the information of an audio performance. And
Speaker 1: while you might say that the sounds not captured might
Speaker 1: be outside the range of human hearing, they might somehow
Speaker 1: shape other sounds in the recording in ways that aren't
Speaker 1: replicable in digital formats and only happen as we actively
Speaker 1: listen to analog music. So the sounds we can't hear
Speaker 1: might affect sounds we do hear, But if those are
Speaker 1: never captured on digital recording, if they are blocked from
Speaker 1: being recorded, then we'll be hearing something we weren't meant
Speaker 1: to hear. On top of that, if there are frequencies
Speaker 1: that are greater than the niquist rate, those frequencies are
Speaker 1: attenuated and end up being at a lower frequency than
Speaker 1: they should, which is called aliasing. Aliasing is a real problem,
Speaker 1: and so to address that, engineers designed analog to digital
Speaker 1: converters or A d c s, and they incorporate a
Speaker 1: low pass filter. The ideas the filter kind of acts
Speaker 1: like a bouncer at a nightclub. If a frequency in
Speaker 1: an analog audio source would be higher than twenty two
Speaker 1: point oh five killer hurts, which is the niquist limit
Speaker 1: for c d s. Since it's half the niquist rate
Speaker 1: of forty four point one killer hurts, then the filter
Speaker 1: doesn't let that frequency through the converter. It says, sorry, sorry,
Speaker 1: you're too high pitched, we're not laying you in. That
Speaker 1: information uh never makes it to the recording. In other words,
Speaker 1: it gets blocked. Now, if the A d C is
Speaker 1: well designed and really well implemented, the recorded audio shouldn't
Speaker 1: really be affected in that case. But early A d
Speaker 1: c s were a bit primitive and sometimes they could
Speaker 1: degrade audio quality, giving music lovers ammunition in the vitriolic
Speaker 1: analog versus digital debate. And I'll probably touch on audio
Speaker 1: file objections now and again through the rest of this series,
Speaker 1: but let's get back to information storage. You store information
Speaker 1: on CDs in the form of little pits and and
Speaker 1: flat sections really, and a CD player has a laser
Speaker 1: that scans across the surf so of the c D
Speaker 1: and it detects these pits or the smooth sections. And
Speaker 1: these are very very small features on the c D.
Speaker 1: On a casual glance, you would never see them. You
Speaker 1: would really need to look super close, like with a
Speaker 1: microscope to be able to see them. These sections on
Speaker 1: the c D represent zeros and ones, the binary digital
Speaker 1: information that the player will decode and then interpret as audio.
Speaker 1: On top of that, the laser starts from the inside
Speaker 1: edge of the c D and works outward in a spiral.
Speaker 1: It's sort of the reverse of a vinyl album. So
Speaker 1: if you wanted to listen to a full vinyl album,
Speaker 1: you would put the needle or stylus on the outer
Speaker 1: edge of that album, and as the record turns on
Speaker 1: the turntable, the stylus makes its way down the spiral
Speaker 1: path of the groove, slowly moving towards the center of
Speaker 1: the record until it gets to the end of that side.
Speaker 1: C D s go the other way. The laser positions
Speaker 1: itself near the center for the beginning of the album,
Speaker 1: and then slow he moves outward toward the edge as
Speaker 1: the album continues to play. The music industry's response to
Speaker 1: the introduction of this technology wasn't immediately overwhelming. Music studios
Speaker 1: thought was interesting, but a lot of the retail establishments
Speaker 1: kind of resisted. Uh. They expressed some reluctance, and they
Speaker 1: gave a lot of different reasons for their pessimism. One
Speaker 1: perceived shortcoming was that c D s are much smaller
Speaker 1: than vinyl records, and that meant they might more easily
Speaker 1: be stolen. So there was a worry about shoplifting that
Speaker 1: these the c d s. Because of their form factor,
Speaker 1: you could probably shove one under your jacket and casually
Speaker 1: walk out of the record store and no one would
Speaker 1: be able to notice. Whereas vinyl albums took up more space,
Speaker 1: it was harder to to get away with that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. One of the ways that some retailers tried
Speaker 1: to fix this perceived problem was in the packaging see PolyGram.
Speaker 1: The division over at Phillips had come up with what
Speaker 1: would become the standard CD case, also known as the
Speaker 1: jewel case. The purpose of the case was to protect
Speaker 1: the reflective surface of the c D that's the side
Speaker 1: that actually contains all the information on it, and the
Speaker 1: cases needed to hold that c D in place so
Speaker 1: it didn't slide around because it could potentially get scratched
Speaker 1: up if it slid around, And the case needed to
Speaker 1: be fairly inexpensive to produce, because otherwise it was going
Speaker 1: to add to the already premium price of a compact disc.
Speaker 1: The original jewel cases were thicker than the ones that
Speaker 1: would come on later, and the original ones were less
Speaker 1: likely to break. They were much more resilient. But as
Speaker 1: competition drove companies to find ways to cut costs, many
Speaker 1: would take liberties with the design of the jewel cases
Speaker 1: and make them with less plastic material, make them thinner
Speaker 1: and less dirty. In North America, retailers would put the
Speaker 1: CD jewel cases in what we're called long boxes. These
Speaker 1: packages were twelve inches in length that's about thirty point
Speaker 1: five centimeters. This was way longer than a jewel case was,
Speaker 1: but it meant that the boxes could easily fit in
Speaker 1: the displays that had previously held LP vinyl records, because
Speaker 1: that was about the same height as a vinyl record sleeve.
Speaker 1: So long boxes required special art or they were in
Speaker 1: generic white boxes that had sort of a a clear
Speaker 1: panel that would allow you to see the cover art
Speaker 1: on the jewel case that was inside the box. The
Speaker 1: boxes were also harder to hide under a jacket or something,
Speaker 1: so they were thought of as a sort of theft
Speaker 1: deterrent strategy, but they were also really wasteful, and after
Speaker 1: pressure from several different fronts, including artists and consumers and
Speaker 1: environmental advocacy groups, it forced the industry's hand in the
Speaker 1: long box, said Farewell, and retailers focused on selling CDs
Speaker 1: that were just in the jewel case, albeit with other
Speaker 1: anti theft measures put in place in you know, in
Speaker 1: order to again deter that shoplifting. One retailer said that
Speaker 1: the smaller size might actually make consumers feel like they're
Speaker 1: not getting enough for their money, which I personally pretty
Speaker 1: funny since most people I know weren't thinking about the
Speaker 1: physical media so much as the experience to listening to
Speaker 1: the music that was stored on that media, And there
Speaker 1: was a reluctance to invest in a technology that would
Speaker 1: require retailers to double up on their inventories because they
Speaker 1: would have to carry both vinyl records and c d s,
Speaker 1: or later on cassettes and CDs. That was something that
Speaker 1: the retailers were forced to do. As cassette tape sales
Speaker 1: grew beyond vinyl sales, they were supporting vinyl and cassettes,
Speaker 1: and then some were even doing vinyl, cassettes and CDs
Speaker 1: all at the same time. I was a kid in
Speaker 1: the eighties and I was completely unaware of CDs until
Speaker 1: very late in the nineteen eighties. I always thought music
Speaker 1: was essentially available either on vinyl albums or This was
Speaker 1: way more common the cassette tape when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: That's largely because when CD players first came out, they
Speaker 1: were incredibly expensive, prohibitively so for my budget. So when
Speaker 1: we come back, I'll talk a little bit about what
Speaker 1: the earliest CD player was like and how much it cost,
Speaker 1: and then we'll talk more about the evolution of the
Speaker 1: compact disc as a medium itself. But first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break, all right. So I left off talking
Speaker 1: about how the first CD players were really expensive. Let's
Speaker 1: look at an example. The first consumer c D audio
Speaker 1: player to hit the market was Sony's c D P
Speaker 1: one oh one that retailed for nine D dollars as
Speaker 1: the base model. It was an even grand if you
Speaker 1: wanted to get the unit that had a remote control,
Speaker 1: a little infrared remote control you could use. Adjusted for inflation,
Speaker 1: that would be the same as about two thousand, three
Speaker 1: hundred to two thousand five fifty dollars today just for
Speaker 1: a CD player, not like a full stereo system with
Speaker 1: speakers and everything. The CDs themselves cost about thirty dollars
Speaker 1: a piece, which, again if we adjust for inflation, is
Speaker 1: today about seventy six dollars. So just imagine that albums
Speaker 1: costing more than seventy five bucks a pop. You really
Speaker 1: better like that band before you PLoP down the cash
Speaker 1: for their latest album. I found a review for the
Speaker 1: c d P one ah one player online which revealed
Speaker 1: some other interesting tedbits. For example, the prototype model that
Speaker 1: Sony had shown off earlier UH played discs vertically, with
Speaker 1: the playing surface parallel to the front of the player.
Speaker 1: The c d P one oh one went with what
Speaker 1: would become the more traditional orientation for most CD players,
Speaker 1: with a horizontal tray that would slide out to accept
Speaker 1: a c D before sliding back into the player. The
Speaker 1: review also went into how the CD would allow you
Speaker 1: to do things that you couldn't do with other types
Speaker 1: of recorded media and allowed you to to skip to
Speaker 1: specific track X or sometimes they call them bands on
Speaker 1: the CD, not bands as in musical bands, but bands
Speaker 1: is in bands of of recording, so track one, track
Speaker 1: two or band one band two made it really easy
Speaker 1: to select a specific passage or song on the c D.
Speaker 1: And it also the review marveled and how you could
Speaker 1: quickly skim through a track and you could hear a
Speaker 1: sped up version of the music as you were going through,
Speaker 1: either fast boarding or rewinding. But while it was sped up,
Speaker 1: it didn't increase in pitch. You know, if you increase
Speaker 1: the rotational speed of a turntable, then the pitch of
Speaker 1: the record increases as well, something that lead to never
Speaker 1: ending hours of entertainment. When I would put a thirty
Speaker 1: three rpm record on a turntable but switched the turntable
Speaker 1: to forty five rpm so that everything sounded like it
Speaker 1: was sung by the chipmunks. You really haven't listened to
Speaker 1: Pink Floyd's the Wall until you've listened to the Chipmunks
Speaker 1: saying Pink Floyd's the Wall. Anyway, that didn't happen with
Speaker 1: CDs because it was in a digital format. It wasn't
Speaker 1: an analog signal that was being sped up and with
Speaker 1: a pitch increasing. It was literally just skipping through the
Speaker 1: digital file, so you would get this sped up effect,
Speaker 1: but the pitch remained the same. Another option that the
Speaker 1: review mentioned was the option to play a track on repeat.
Speaker 1: Apparently that merited special mentioned because it's again something that
Speaker 1: you could not easily do on vinyl or cassette. Uh.
Speaker 1: You could do it like if you listen to a
Speaker 1: particular track on vinyl, after that track has finished playing,
Speaker 1: you could get up, walk over to the turntable, gently
Speaker 1: lift the stylus, gently move it back to the beginning
Speaker 1: of that track, drop it back down, and listen to
Speaker 1: it again. Cassettes were worse because you had to push stop,
Speaker 1: hit rewind, push play, find out where you are in
Speaker 1: the track. Maybe you've gone too far, maybe you haven't
Speaker 1: gone far enough. Adjust that way. CDs made it so
Speaker 1: much easier. You could just hit a little button and
Speaker 1: it would repeat the song you liked as many times
Speaker 1: as you wanted until you got tired of it and
Speaker 1: you told it to stop. It happens to be baby Shark.
Speaker 1: You might just leave it on for weeks at a
Speaker 1: time for your child. Yeah, Anyway, the CD player really
Speaker 1: started to get popular in Japan pretty quickly, and Europe
Speaker 1: followed not too long after that. It took longer to
Speaker 1: get traction in the United States, and part of that
Speaker 1: was just logistical because the manufacturing facilities for the players
Speaker 1: and for the c ds we're all in Japan, and
Speaker 1: those facilities were already chugging away to meet domestic demand.
Speaker 1: That left very little breathing room to produce units for
Speaker 1: the US market. And in fact, in the beginning, there
Speaker 1: were only two manufacturing facilities in the entire world that
Speaker 1: were making compact discs, and they were each owned by
Speaker 1: Phillips and Sony. And that price was a really big
Speaker 1: barrier too, Like, not a lot of people were willing
Speaker 1: to jump in. There was a limited number of material
Speaker 1: out there for the players, and they were really expensive. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: cassettes and records were relatively cheap. It would take some
Speaker 1: time for the price to come down for CDs to
Speaker 1: start to gain on cassettes, but boy howdy, when it happened,
Speaker 1: it happened big time. The demand for compact discs in
Speaker 1: Japan led to more investment in the industry, and soon
Speaker 1: there were six manufacturing facilities, and not long after that
Speaker 1: it grew to forty manufacturing plants that were churning out
Speaker 1: compact discs. The technology was gaining momentum, and with the
Speaker 1: increased output came improvements in manufacturing with more efficient processes,
Speaker 1: which led to a steady decrease in manufacturing cost, which
Speaker 1: meant companies could sell their products for less money while
Speaker 1: still maintaining a profitable business. This in turn led to
Speaker 1: wider adoption of the technology in general, and this is
Speaker 1: how new tech typically works out. If it's new tech
Speaker 1: that you know, actually works and has an appeal to
Speaker 1: a customer base, the early versions are really expensive and
Speaker 1: sometimes prohibitively so for much of the intended market. Then
Speaker 1: you get early adopters. If you have enough of those
Speaker 1: jumping on, they're able to demonstrate that there's a demand
Speaker 1: for that technology that merits additional investment. The investment means
Speaker 1: that you've paved the way for the rest of us
Speaker 1: to get a chance to join in once those price
Speaker 1: tags are more in line with our own personal budgets.
Speaker 1: So I'm thankful for early adopters. Um I don't quite
Speaker 1: make the money to be one most of the time anyway.
Speaker 1: In the first year of sales, Sony sold twenty thousand
Speaker 1: CD players, which is not an enormous number, but it
Speaker 1: was significant for a brand new technology that was going
Speaker 1: head to head with vinyl and the emerging cassette market.
Speaker 1: And other companies besides Sony and Phillips began to make
Speaker 1: players as well. And it's here that I mentioned that
Speaker 1: the first CD title, according to some sources, wasn't Abba,
Speaker 1: nor was it a Symphony, but was rather Billy Joel's
Speaker 1: album fifty two Street. In the last episode, I mentioned
Speaker 1: Abba and Classical Music were the first albums pressed to
Speaker 1: c D. Other sources called Billy Joel's album fifty two
Speaker 1: Street the first CD album UM, and then The Guardian
Speaker 1: says the first album recorded specifically with the c D
Speaker 1: medium in mind was Dire straits Uh Brothers in Arms
Speaker 1: in So it may well be that all of these
Speaker 1: are true to some extent. That Abba and the Symphony
Speaker 1: were pressed to c D, UM, that Street was uh
Speaker 1: it debuted, and then one of the formats it debuted
Speaker 1: on was the c D, and that Brothers in Arms
Speaker 1: came out specifically four CDs and was engineered for that purpose.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's what it all means. All I can tell
Speaker 1: you is that history tends to be complicated, and there
Speaker 1: are a lot of stories out there that, at least
Speaker 1: on first glance, seemed to contradict each other. Well, the
Speaker 1: music industry racked up sixteen points seven million dollars in
Speaker 1: CD sales. Uh, that's a lot of cash. But vinyl
Speaker 1: albums were bringing in one point nine billion dollars that
Speaker 1: same year, so nearly two billion compared to CDs at
Speaker 1: sixteen point seven million. Cassette tapes were not that far
Speaker 1: behind vinyl. In night three and the following year in
Speaker 1: eight four, cassettes sales surpassed vinyl and kept going strong,
Speaker 1: and CDs were laying the foundation for future success. So
Speaker 1: this is what kind of set the tone, at least
Speaker 1: in the United States, for vinyl to go on the decline,
Speaker 1: cassettes to rule the eighties, and for CDs to be
Speaker 1: well positioned to take over after that. Sony even tried
Speaker 1: to get a jump on portable CD players in the
Speaker 1: very very early days of the technology. Back in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, Sony had released the Walkman, the portable cassette
Speaker 1: player that was a popular accessory in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: just watch any comedy from the nineteen eighties or set
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties, and you'll likely see one you know,
Speaker 1: like Back to the Future. It factors into the plot
Speaker 1: in the original Back to the Future. Anyway. By the
Speaker 1: mid nineties, Sony was trying to replicate the success of
Speaker 1: the Walkman with a CD player, and the result was
Speaker 1: the Discman D fifty, the world's first portable CD player.
Speaker 1: And while the D fifty had some shortcomings, it truly
Speaker 1: was an amazing technological achievement. See, the D fifty was small.
Speaker 1: It was about the size of maybe five or six
Speaker 1: c D cases stacked on top of each other, so
Speaker 1: that meant all the circuitry and all the components of
Speaker 1: a full size c D player needed to be shrunk
Speaker 1: down to fit this tiny form factor. And this was
Speaker 1: just a couple of years after the full sized version
Speaker 1: of a CD player had come out. So it's hard
Speaker 1: to explain exactly how challenging this was, but here's an example.
Speaker 1: The optical path for the laser was a huge obstacle.
Speaker 1: To work around the size constraints, Sony engineers had to
Speaker 1: figure out how to fold the optical path to make
Speaker 1: enough space for it. To have the laser position in
Speaker 1: the right way for the disc. On top of that,
Speaker 1: the engineers had to custom build all the circuits for
Speaker 1: the D fifty to both fit inside this small case
Speaker 1: and not immediately drain the batteries of all their juice.
Speaker 1: Even so, the D fifty was a pretty power thirsty gadget.
Speaker 1: As Walkman Central, a fun website, has explained, you could
Speaker 1: buy a battery holder that would plug into the D
Speaker 1: fifty to supply the electricity you would need to jam
Speaker 1: out to your tunes. And one version was called the
Speaker 1: e P B nine C battery pack and it would
Speaker 1: hold either six C cell batteries sometimes called U eleven
Speaker 1: batteries in Britain at that time. They are about two
Speaker 1: inches in length and about an inch in diameter. And
Speaker 1: another option was a big bulky rechargeable battery that would
Speaker 1: plug into the e P B nine C and you
Speaker 1: would put the D fifty inside this battery packets sort
Speaker 1: of acted like a protective case, and then you would
Speaker 1: wear the whole thing with a shoulder strap. So technically
Speaker 1: the system was portable, but it was kind of portable
Speaker 1: in the same way that the earliest portable phones were
Speaker 1: portable you wouldn't want to go jogging with one. On
Speaker 1: top of that, this was before companies had developed anti
Speaker 1: skip software technologies that could keep a CD player on
Speaker 1: track even if the player were jostled by someone jogging
Speaker 1: or a car hitting a bump on the road or something.
Speaker 1: So moving around while listening to music might also mean
Speaker 1: hearing some skipping as you did. So it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: until the mid to late nineties that that technology would
Speaker 1: start to make these portable systems much more viable, and
Speaker 1: by then the ending of the CD era was already
Speaker 1: on the horizon. The D fifty also was marketed as
Speaker 1: a more affordable compact disc player. It didn't cost nearly
Speaker 1: as much as the c d P one on one, which,
Speaker 1: if you remember, reta for a thousand dollars if you
Speaker 1: wanted the version that came with a remote control. The
Speaker 1: D fifty came in at a budget price of just
Speaker 1: three fifty dollars in nineteen four, which is still admittedly
Speaker 1: pretty expensive. In fact, if we adjusted for inflation into
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen dollars, that's about eight hundred fifty six
Speaker 1: bucks for a portable CD player. By seven, CDs were
Speaker 1: accounting for more than one point five billion dollars in sales.
Speaker 1: Cassettes were still leading the pack, but CDs were now
Speaker 1: outperforming vinyl records at that time, so compact discs ended
Speaker 1: up catching up too, and then passing vinyl records sales,
Speaker 1: although you could argue that the final record sales were
Speaker 1: on the decline not from compact discs but rather from
Speaker 1: the domination of cassette tapes. In nine nine, the last
Speaker 1: year that cassettes would outperform compact discs, the two formats
Speaker 1: were nearly neck and neck. Cassettes made up about three
Speaker 1: point six three billion dollars in sales revenue and see
Speaker 1: d s were at three point three six billions, so
Speaker 1: right behind, and in nine CD sales would outperform cassette sales,
Speaker 1: and it seemed like the compact disc would become the
Speaker 1: definitive medium for recorded music, but in truth it would
Speaker 1: rain for less than a decade. Sales would peak in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine and around fifteen billion dollars, and those
Speaker 1: figures would take a very slight dip in two thousand
Speaker 1: and then every year after that, CD sales figures were
Speaker 1: on the decline. We'll go more into that in just
Speaker 1: a second, so Japan was going nuts for compact discs
Speaker 1: shortly after their introduction, as well as a related technology,
Speaker 1: the mini disc, which failed to get very much support
Speaker 1: in the United States. In Europe, compact disc sales began
Speaker 1: to pick up. Starting in nineteen five. PolyGram Phillips's music
Speaker 1: branch was leading the pack in CD production, with the
Speaker 1: partnership of CBS and Sony taking second place. Cassettes were
Speaker 1: still doing really well. Unlike the early as with compact discs,
Speaker 1: cassettes worked pretty well for car stereo systems and portable systems.
Speaker 1: You didn't have to worry about all that skipping. Plus,
Speaker 1: you could buy a blank cassette and you could record
Speaker 1: to them, and initially you could not do that with
Speaker 1: compact discs. It wasn't until nine when companies started to
Speaker 1: develop the Compact Disc Recordable or c d R format,
Speaker 1: and even then it wasn't available on the consumer market.
Speaker 1: It took a few years for the tech to make
Speaker 1: its way to that market. It was available for professional
Speaker 1: use as early as nineteen uh Pioneer would go on
Speaker 1: to introduce a c d R for the consumer market
Speaker 1: in nineteen six. The earliest CDR drives were slow. It
Speaker 1: took sometimes hours to burn data to a CDR, whether
Speaker 1: it was music or anything else, and because of other
Speaker 1: technological limitations, primarily how computers at the time we're not
Speaker 1: super well suited for dealing with really large file sizes,
Speaker 1: the qual do you burned music in the early days,
Speaker 1: if you were using a consumer c DR typically was
Speaker 1: lower than what you would get from a pre recorded
Speaker 1: c D from a store. Still, the introduction of a
Speaker 1: writable disc meant that the CD was starting to catch
Speaker 1: up to all the benefits of having a cassette, and
Speaker 1: it also set the stage for the introduction of the
Speaker 1: c D r W or rewriteable compact disc, in which
Speaker 1: you can only record to c D but you can
Speaker 1: also a race and re record to it. Phillips introduced
Speaker 1: a CD recorder for c D R and c D
Speaker 1: r W formats in ninete, and you could say that
Speaker 1: this also helped set up the c D for its
Speaker 1: eventual decline, as c ds became more popular, displacing cassettes,
Speaker 1: which in turn had displaced vinyl records. The music industry
Speaker 1: was I was dancing in the streets, I guess so speak.
Speaker 1: Sales were great. The industry was making more money than
Speaker 1: ever before, fifteen billion dollars in an enormous amount of money.
Speaker 1: But part of that was due to what some other
Speaker 1: people would call false flags. People weren't just buying new albums.
Speaker 1: They were also repurchasing albums that they had already owned
Speaker 1: in other formats, like on cassette or vinyl, than they
Speaker 1: would go out and buy the CD version. And so
Speaker 1: while sales were great, it wasn't necessarily an indicator that
Speaker 1: newer work was doing better than any preceding medium. It's
Speaker 1: not saying that, oh, we're selling more new albums now
Speaker 1: than we were when we were selling cassettes or vinyl records.
Speaker 1: It was more that a lot of people were backfilling
Speaker 1: their music libraries by going through the catalogs of these
Speaker 1: record labels and repurchasing these albums. I've seen the same
Speaker 1: thing happen with tech stuff. Actually, as new listeners discover
Speaker 1: the show, they tend to dip into the back catalog
Speaker 1: of episodes, and so my numbers will bump up a
Speaker 1: bit whenever that happens, but you can't count on that
Speaker 1: going on indefinitely. Eventually those higher numbers will peak and
Speaker 1: then they'll decline. Now, if you're lucky, you can still
Speaker 1: see steady but probably less dramatic growth once things settled down.
Speaker 1: If you're not lucky, you'll see sales continue to diminish
Speaker 1: over time, and c d s would be not lucky.
Speaker 1: I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break. One of the big reasons, or
Speaker 1: actually two of the big reasons why c d s
Speaker 1: weren't lucky. It was a double ammy. It was in
Speaker 1: the form of computer advances and the development of audio
Speaker 1: compression file formats, primarily the MP three. We'll go into
Speaker 1: more detail about m P three's and other foul formats
Speaker 1: in our next episode, but they definitely hurt CD sales
Speaker 1: as time went on. In two thousand, the music industry
Speaker 1: saw a decline in CD sales, and every year after that,
Speaker 1: that decline continued and it got more dramatic. In an
Speaker 1: effort to fight off the inevitable and also to combat piracy,
Speaker 1: as computers were getting better at ripping music from c
Speaker 1: d s and writing it to a different disc, companies
Speaker 1: began to incorporate digital rights management, or DRM on their
Speaker 1: c d s. The idea was that this DRM would
Speaker 1: limit how you could actually use the compact disc. Sony's
Speaker 1: BMG music label did this to disastrous results. It's one
Speaker 1: of the the big warning signs warning stories of DRM
Speaker 1: and unintended consequences, or potentially unintended. Some argue that they
Speaker 1: were completely intentional consequences, which makes it even worse. So
Speaker 1: what was this all about. Well, let's say you go
Speaker 1: out and you buy an album that was from Sony's
Speaker 1: BMG label, and this is around two thousand five or
Speaker 1: two thousand six. You buy this c D and you
Speaker 1: put in a normal CD player, Well, it would work
Speaker 1: just the way it was supposed to, no problems there.
Speaker 1: You're just putting it in a stereo system or maybe
Speaker 1: your are a little portable CD player or whatever. It
Speaker 1: works just fine. However, if you were to put it
Speaker 1: into your computer, either to listen to it, or maybe
Speaker 1: you wanted to rip a copy so that way you
Speaker 1: had to back up something like that, something else happened.
Speaker 1: There was some code on the disks that would prompt
Speaker 1: your computer to automatically install some software on your PC.
Speaker 1: The purpose of the software, at least the stated purpose,
Speaker 1: was to prevent someone from making unauthorized copies of that
Speaker 1: compact disc. In other words, to prevent people from pirating
Speaker 1: the music, but the software also opened up a backdoor
Speaker 1: vulnerability on the person's PC, meaning it was possible for
Speaker 1: a third party to infiltrate that computer and take control
Speaker 1: of it. Uh. In fact, essentially what was happening was
Speaker 1: the CD was prompting the computer to phone home to
Speaker 1: Sony b MGS servers and to give information about how
Speaker 1: the person was using that c D, what was there,
Speaker 1: what were there listening habits. It was kind of spying
Speaker 1: on the consumer, and you could argue that the Sony
Speaker 1: b MG DRM software was behaving like malware, like a
Speaker 1: trojan horse or a backdoor vulnerability. The discovery of the
Speaker 1: DRM lad to class action lawsuits and a lot of
Speaker 1: pressure from the industry, and eventually Sony would stop the
Speaker 1: practice completely by two thousand seven. UM. It was not
Speaker 1: a pretty picture. It was a very ugly story and also,
Speaker 1: like I said, a warning not just two companies, but
Speaker 1: to consumers that be aware that anytime you are introducing
Speaker 1: anything to your computer, there are the there are possible
Speaker 1: vulnerabilities you could be introducing. In some cases it could
Speaker 1: be really really intrusive, so you gotta be careful. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not to say that the decline of the
Speaker 1: compact disc was instantaneous, that the CD form factor and
Speaker 1: went obsolete overnight. It stuck around for a really long time.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's only been fairly recently that some of
Speaker 1: the larger retailers have kind of moved away from selling
Speaker 1: c d s. In the winter of retailer best Buy
Speaker 1: announced that it was going to stop carrying compact discs
Speaker 1: and its stores starting on July one, two thousen. Target
Speaker 1: meanwhile went a slightly different route. They said they would
Speaker 1: continue to sell compact discs, but they would do it
Speaker 1: on consignment. So, in other words, instead of ordering a
Speaker 1: large inventory of c ds and trying to sell them,
Speaker 1: you know, paying for that inventory, trying to sell the
Speaker 1: CDs and then if they didn't sell stock, they would
Speaker 1: send it back to the studio for credit for future stock.
Speaker 1: Instead of doing that now, Target says, no, here's how
Speaker 1: we're gonna do it. We will sell copies of CDs
Speaker 1: and for every copy we sell will send a little
Speaker 1: bit of money back to the studio. But other eyes,
Speaker 1: we're not doing it. So if you don't want to
Speaker 1: work with us on that, you're not going to have
Speaker 1: your CDs held carried in our stores because people were
Speaker 1: buying so few of them now, and it puts the
Speaker 1: risk of inventory on the music studios rather than on
Speaker 1: targets stores, and it just changes where the risk ends
Speaker 1: up falling. That change has continued, right, Uh, And really
Speaker 1: you could say that the writing was on the wall
Speaker 1: by two thousand fourteen, when digital music sales over the
Speaker 1: Internet were eclipsing CD revenue, and even then digital was
Speaker 1: on the decline. It was it was already on the
Speaker 1: downward slope. It had peaked at that point and was
Speaker 1: it was outperforming CDs, but both CDs and digital sales
Speaker 1: were starting to lag behind. Like I said a moment ago,
Speaker 1: in our next episode, we're going to explore the rise
Speaker 1: of the digital file era, which leads into what we're
Speaker 1: seeing today with consumption moving more towards streaming services rather
Speaker 1: than downloading tracks or buying physical media. One thing I
Speaker 1: want to shift to before I end this episode would
Speaker 1: be the evolution of video media in the wake of
Speaker 1: the c D. The digital versatile disc or DVD evolved
Speaker 1: from the compact disc. It was effectively the second generation
Speaker 1: of the c D technology. Even as companies like Sony
Speaker 1: and Phillips were trying to get the c D into
Speaker 1: the consumer market. They were simultaneously researching how to improve
Speaker 1: that technology in order to store even more data on it,
Speaker 1: including video with sound. That development would mostly happen behind
Speaker 1: closed doors for a little more than a decade among
Speaker 1: various companies. By the mid nine nineties, there were two
Speaker 1: formats that had emerged from R and D departments. They
Speaker 1: weren't on the market yet, but they were almost ready,
Speaker 1: and one was with Sony and Phillips. They had developed
Speaker 1: a technology that they called the Multimedia c D or
Speaker 1: m M c D. Meanwhile, you had another group that
Speaker 1: was including the Time Warner Group and Toshiba, and they
Speaker 1: had developed a different approach called the Super Density or
Speaker 1: s D disc. Neither side was eager to engage in
Speaker 1: an all out format war like the one that pitted
Speaker 1: Beta Max versus VHS and fractured the market, so instead
Speaker 1: they decided that they were going to work together to
Speaker 1: develop a common standard between them, and it was mostly
Speaker 1: based off the s D format from Tashiba. This became
Speaker 1: the DVD and by companies were starting to produce DVD players,
Speaker 1: which originally went on sale in Japan and then expanded
Speaker 1: from there, and like CD players when they first came out,
Speaker 1: they were pretty darn expensive, but it actually the path
Speaker 1: for DVD to hit widespread adoption. It happened much more
Speaker 1: quickly than CD players did. Like a CD player, a
Speaker 1: DVD uses a laser to read pits on the reflective
Speaker 1: surface of a disc, but the lasers in DVD players
Speaker 1: use a shorter wavelength of light than the lasers and
Speaker 1: CD players. A laser in a compact disc player emitst
Speaker 1: red light at a wavelength of around seven eighty nanometers,
Speaker 1: DVD players were in the sixty five and six hundred
Speaker 1: fifty nanometer range. The shorter wavelength meant that the pits
Speaker 1: on a DVD can be smaller than those you would
Speaker 1: have on a c D. So smaller pits means you
Speaker 1: can pack more pits in the same amount of space,
Speaker 1: meaning you can put more data on the disc. And
Speaker 1: that's why you can fit a full length film on
Speaker 1: a DVD with audio using a compression format like IMPEG
Speaker 1: two and a c D can't hold that much information.
Speaker 1: The DVD format brought with it improvements in picture and
Speaker 1: sound quality, and it also allowed for interactive features such
Speaker 1: as menus chapter selection, commentary tracks, bonus footage, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, So it really helped set it self apart
Speaker 1: from the VHS form factor the video tape, so the
Speaker 1: DVD format allowed consumers to navigate films more easily, So
Speaker 1: it kind of comparison between compact discs and audio cassettes.
Speaker 1: DVDs had the same advantages over video cassettes even when
Speaker 1: they were first introduced. DVDs could hold more information than
Speaker 1: a typical VHS tape unless you were, you know, using
Speaker 1: like a consumer video tape and you were recording at
Speaker 1: the slowest possible setting, meaning that you were using the
Speaker 1: least amount of tape to capture video. It would result
Speaker 1: in the lowest quality video, but you would be able
Speaker 1: to put a lot of it onto a single tape. Well,
Speaker 1: DVDs could hold way more information than your your standard,
Speaker 1: uh good VHS tape. These DVDs were single side, single
Speaker 1: layer discs, but the format allowed for up to two
Speaker 1: recordable layers per side, so you would get a double
Speaker 1: layer disc or even a double sided double layer disc.
Speaker 1: With a double layer disc, the reading laser can actually
Speaker 1: focus through one layer of data on a disk to
Speaker 1: see a second layer written underneath it. You can think
Speaker 1: of it almost like imagine you've got two sheets of
Speaker 1: paper and you've used a very dark ink, and the
Speaker 1: paper itself is almost translucent, and you can read what's
Speaker 1: written on the top sheet, and you can look through
Speaker 1: the top sheet and see what's written on the bottom sheet. Well,
Speaker 1: imagine you've got like some sort of magic X ray
Speaker 1: glasses that let you read the bottom sheet as if
Speaker 1: there was nothing, you know, obscuring your view. That's kind
Speaker 1: of how a double layer DVD works. The single layer
Speaker 1: DVD can hold up to four point thirty eight gigabytes
Speaker 1: worth of information. A single sided double layer DVD can
Speaker 1: hold seven point nine five gigabytes, not quite twice as
Speaker 1: much as a single layer DVD. So why is that?
Speaker 1: Why can a double layer DVD only hold a little
Speaker 1: less than twice as much while it's because, in order
Speaker 1: to avoid interference between layers, the pits on a double
Speaker 1: layer DVD have to be slightly longer than they would
Speaker 1: first single layer, so you can pack slightly less information
Speaker 1: per layer. Thus it's not quite twice as much. If
Speaker 1: you have a double sided, double layered DVD, you could
Speaker 1: store whopping fifteen point nine gigabytes of information on it
Speaker 1: then That would end up being dwarfed by Blu Ray
Speaker 1: later on, but at the time it was incredibly impressive.
Speaker 1: The DVD caught on faster in the market than the
Speaker 1: contact disc did. It only took a few years before
Speaker 1: DVD sales were outperforming VHS. It was early two two
Speaker 1: when the DVD Entertainment Group broke that news video rental
Speaker 1: stores were starting to phase out VHS copies of the film.
Speaker 1: They were leaning harder on the DVD format themselves, and
Speaker 1: the writing was on the wall, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: even in two thousand two, there were more than twice
Speaker 1: as many, how useholds that had VCRs as those that
Speaker 1: had DVD players. There were ninety six million households the
Speaker 1: head of VCR, and twenty five million had a DVD player.
Speaker 1: But people with DVD players were spending more buying more films,
Speaker 1: so it was pretty much a sign of what was
Speaker 1: to come. This was also really good news to the
Speaker 1: movie and TV studios out there. And unlike VCRs, your
Speaker 1: standard consumer DVD player had no way of writing two disks,
Speaker 1: so there was no way to copy discs, at least
Speaker 1: not initially. There were computers that would get DVD R drives,
Speaker 1: and you could invest in some specialized equipment to copy disks,
Speaker 1: but most people didn't have access to that, and in
Speaker 1: the early days, it took a long time to write
Speaker 1: a significant amount of data to a DVD, So studios
Speaker 1: had less of an adverse reaction to the DVD format
Speaker 1: compared to the VHS tape. They didn't see it as
Speaker 1: a threat to their business. On top of that, the
Speaker 1: industry's experience with VCRs had taught it the incredible value
Speaker 1: of the home market. They knew there's this market of
Speaker 1: consumers eager to buy up a catalog of movies, so
Speaker 1: they had already established that with VCRs, and they were
Speaker 1: able to apply that with DVDs. It gave these companies
Speaker 1: ways to monetize their back catalogs of films and television shows.
Speaker 1: So they leverage that knowledge with the DVD format. And
Speaker 1: unlike the prerecorded VHS tapes when they first came out,
Speaker 1: you know, those those cost eight dollars apiece when they
Speaker 1: first debuted in the early eighties, DVDs were much more
Speaker 1: reasonably priced. They typically fell around the twenty dollar range
Speaker 1: for a single film. The extras really helped too. They
Speaker 1: gave creators the chance to provide more insight into their work.
Speaker 1: Fans got way more material. They could watch a show
Speaker 1: or a movie with commentary to learn about what went
Speaker 1: into making it. They could hear about behind the scenes
Speaker 1: drama or challengers the makers faced when they were making
Speaker 1: their productions. Not every DVD contained that kind of extra,
Speaker 1: but enough of them did to create sort of an
Speaker 1: expectation among collectors. Uh. It also meant that sometimes a
Speaker 1: show that had gone off the air would come back
Speaker 1: because there'd be a demonstrable demand for that show. A
Speaker 1: big example of that is Family Guy. It was on Fox,
Speaker 1: it got canceled, the DVDs went on sale, the sales
Speaker 1: were really good, and it convinced Fox to bring the
Speaker 1: program back. The DVD also opened up opportunities for different
Speaker 1: versions of the same work. Ask any fan of a
Speaker 1: movie like Brazil or Blade Runner or Evil Dead about
Speaker 1: their DVD collection, and you'll likely hear that they own
Speaker 1: several different copies of their favorite film. This created yet
Speaker 1: another way for companies to profit from their catalogs, will
Speaker 1: simultaneously satisfying the insatiable demands of consumers and yep I
Speaker 1: own a few different copies of Evil Dead, so I'm
Speaker 1: one of those suckers anyway. Like the VHS era, the
Speaker 1: DVD also create opportunities for independent makers to burn their
Speaker 1: works directly to disk, by passing the studios and going
Speaker 1: straight to market. So the direct to DVD industry thrived
Speaker 1: as well, and some companies like Circuit City tried to
Speaker 1: launch a competitor to DVD. The Circuit City version was
Speaker 1: called Digital Video Express or DIVIS, not to be confused
Speaker 1: by the codec that's the same name. A DIVIS player
Speaker 1: required a connection to a phone line, so each DIVIS
Speaker 1: disk had a barcode on it that the player would
Speaker 1: be able to read, and it could send information over
Speaker 1: the phone line to a centralized server which kept track
Speaker 1: of all the discs on the network. If you purchased
Speaker 1: a basic disc, you would get essentially a license to
Speaker 1: view the movie within forty eight hours. If you wanted
Speaker 1: to watch it after those forty eight hours were over,
Speaker 1: you would have to pay for an upgrade to watch
Speaker 1: it for some more viewing time, and even then it's
Speaker 1: just another two days. There was a pretty strong negative
Speaker 1: reaction from the home theater enthusiasts out there, and the
Speaker 1: format did not do well, in fact, it only took
Speaker 1: a year by Circuit City pulled the plug on dvics. Now,
Speaker 1: in our next episode, I'm gonna talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about the DVD industry and the lead into h
Speaker 1: D DVD and Blu Ray, which is really another format
Speaker 1: war we're going to talk about. We won't spend too
Speaker 1: much time on those formats because while they can pack
Speaker 1: more information on a desk than DVD can, they work
Speaker 1: on essentially the same principle. Then we're gonna transition to
Speaker 1: digital files and streaming services to sort of conclude this series. Uh,
Speaker 1: If you guys have suggestions for other topics, whether it's
Speaker 1: something I should do a full series on or maybe
Speaker 1: just a standalone episode, send me an email. The addresses
Speaker 1: tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Pop on
Speaker 1: over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: You'll find an archive of all of our older episodes,
Speaker 1: plus links to our social media presence on there, so
Speaker 1: you can reach out to me on Facebook or on Twitter.
Speaker 1: You can also check out our online store. We've got
Speaker 1: some fun stuff in there. Go see that stuff and
Speaker 1: maybe about some of it. Don't just look at it,
Speaker 1: but because it goes to help the show and greatly
Speaker 1: appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again. Really said.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.