Cool 1986 ad showing a CD shop: Billboard Magazine, October 4

I wasn't buying CDs back then (I was 16 in 1984). CD shopping would have been fun back then. With inflation, I guess today's prices for Now Voyager and Secret Agent aren't too bad.

 

Yes, CDs were really expensive then. Here an LP would cost £5-6 in 1985 whereas a CD would set you back £13-14. I never begrudged it though. I loved CDs and had been waiting for them all my life.

Now Voyager was always on my 'list' of CDs to buy. I'd had the LP and wasn't overwhelmed by it so it kept getting shoved back. When CDs cost that much, you couldn't just buy any old rubbish! By the time I thought about NV again, well into the 90s, it was out of print.

 

I don't think it's a real store - just set up for this ad in a studio.

 

Nice ad.... Thanks for sharing.

 

I'm the same age and I wasn't buying them either - didn't mow enough lawns to spend that kind of money! Didn't switch to cd until 1987 when I had a real summer job in the college years. Even then I recall CDs often going for $20.

Great thing about cd era was getting all the long out of print LP titles back into the market. Now we need the next product to get all the long out of print CDs back onto the market!

 

Sadly, the next 'product' was downloads. This seems to suit many people these days. Of course, you can get Now Voyager and Secret Agent on download!

 

The store in my town was way less impressive than this place (real or imagined). It had little 12 inch wide clear plastic shelves sparsely--nay, minimalistically--decorating the walls. Upon each of these shelves sat one CD in a longbox. The place probably had about 50 titles total. Despite the small number of titles, they did eventually have The Cure and Elvis Costello (greatest hits compilation for both).

 

Sure, I remember LIFT. They promoted like crazy in the US, but most didn't want CDs sold out of the shrink wrap, longbox, or clamshell in the US. Only saw a very few stores that used these, selling mostly imports or later, used CDs.

A few places in Toronto used them, but most didn't, since they had a mix of US longboxes and European discs in clamshells due to supply and copyright arrangements with labels were different. i.e. an artist on a US label was often on a different one in Canada (like Europe) and different packaging.

Most US stores and the few I saw in Ontario were LP sized bins - so the clamshells or longboxes for the early days.

When I was in Europe more common to see, since discs were sold unwrapped and no longbox or clamshell.

 

It wasn't always fun, Keith, for some easy to understand reason:
1) cost of CD was at least double of a LP, if you found a "special import" (=japan for japan) the price was basically 3 times a LP., So, less (quantity) music to enjoy, unless you had seriously deep pockets, which wasn't easy at 22 and studying at the university.
2) distribution unreliability. I was especially stuck with two CD that had been on backorder for years: Mark Knopfler "Local hero" soundtrack, ordered since day one that i was aware of cd release (around Alchemy time, 1984) and getting it two years later. My "Cal" CD arrived before "Local hero"! The other one was Alan Parsons Stereotomy, that was pulled out after the first pressing run and returned in store only along with Gaudi, again two years of delay, for royalties reasons. By 1984 i had both all Dire Straits and APP discographies on cd, so having these holes in between wasn't fun.
3) Again on the distribution, the japan imports were always hit or miss, so there has been a lot of "miss" just because you spotted one copy one day, it was already reserved for someone else, and... a second copy never materialized anywhere.
4) Lack of serious information about the releases, not only in Japan, but in W.G. too; many things were done only for a specific european country, so what was available in UK or Germany it wasn't for France or Italy or Spain. Between 1984-1985, in order to grow the CD catalog, Polydor released a ton of stuff in small numbers, usually only for Germany distribution, so spanish acts such as Waldo de los Rios "Symphonies" was available only in germany and not in spain, or italian acts such as Peter Jacques Band "Dancing in the street" was only in Germany and not in Italy; import stores were dealing only with non-EU stuff (=Japan), so you had no way to get it anywhere for copyright reasons, because royalties had been paid to Gema (germany) and not Sgae (spain) or Siae (italy).

All this on pre-internet days: today it's easy as a snap of a finger to order a cd in New Zeland or South Africa if you want it, 30 years ago it was impossible - not only to order it, but to know that there existed such a cd.

 

Usually, all of those jewel cases would be unsealed and the actual Compact Discs would be in indexed cardboard sleeves and locked away behind the checkout desk or in those cupboards beneath the display units. When a purchase was made, the sales assistant would have to try retrieve the CD and this could be quite slow, depending on how well their index/filing system system worked.

 

Great observations from back then.

In the USA, in stores that bought from CD distributors (i.e. not large enough to buy direct), imports were spotty depending on the distributor. Some record companies were tough on parallel imports vs. others, so hard to get sometimes or very expensive. Not sure why. An example would be an artist who was on a different label (EMI in UK or Warner in USA) in another country or different distribution (i.e. Geffen was made/distributed by CBS/Sony in Japan). Problem was, in early days, the local market disc (imported from Europe or Japan) was often hard to get or not in stock for undetermined time.

 

Each one of those CDs was $16 or $34 in todays money. No wonder first pressings are so rare.

 

Used to be a store on Hiway 9 in Cupertino that had this system. I must have dropped at least a hundred dollars while it was open.

 

The "different label" between makets has been a problem for some titles, in Europe the only copies of 35DP-4 aka "Wish you were here" that circulated were from the first batch of Sony demo players that needed some demo disks. Import of these was too expensive and too new for early 1983, but the real big problem happened later.
The disk that really caused a total mess, and a serious twist about parallel import that was just starting, was CP35-3016 aka "Abbey Road". Labels forced distributors to cut with parallel import otherwise they wouldn't get the local-market cd.
It took 3-4 years to overcome this situation and find again japan-for-japan cd somewhere, especially for something that wasn't released in Europe or USA - that was the 99% reason for shelling out at least 50% more of the regular price of a cd.

 

Only a hundred?
Boy, that store closed in a hurry!