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Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music early and ad free on Amazon music included with Prime. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill 4 burner gas grill on special. Buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton bay West Grill 7 piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guarant at the Home Depot lot supplies Last pricing valid May 14 through May 27 US only exclusion supplies. See homedepot.com Pricematch for details. Expedia and Visit Scotland Invite you to come Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend. Walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com VisitScotland One of the many great things about music is that we can enjoy it anywhere. I'm talking about the recorded kind. Everyone has a smartphone, and every smartphone has the capability of playing music. Whether you're listening to tracks stored in its memory or streaming something from a service like Spotify or Apple Music. As long as your device has juice, you can enjoy listening to music anywhere you are at any time. Take this program, for example. In its radio show form, it's being heard at homes and cars and offices and workplaces, either over the air or through a stream. If you're listening to the podcast, you might have downloaded it to a phone or a tablet or laptop, which you can fire up anywhere at your convenience. But imagine for a moment that you could not take your music with you. If you wanted to listen to your favorite songs, you had to be present in some specific place and you couldn't move from that space. And that usually meant music inside the home, or perhaps with something like a jukebox. This may sound absolutely awful to you. I mean, we're so used to conjuring up music whenever we want, and wherever we are, we take it with us everywhere. It's hard to imagine life without that ability, but that was the way it was for most of human history. For centuries and centuries, the only way to make music portable was to bring a musical instrument with you and play it yourself. Or bring somebody and have them play it. The idea of making recorded music portable, at least in a way that's convenient, cheap, and Reliable is more recent than you might think, and it went through way more incarnations than you may realize. What do you say we take a look at the history of portable music? This is the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Since we're talking about portable music, let's begin with a good drive in song. It's coming. Keep the car running. Arcade fire with a good song for people on the go. Keep the car running from 2007. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and this is another one of those history of music tech shows where we investigate how we got to where we are when it comes to how we interact with music, specifically this time, how music became so portable. And by that I mean the ability of choosing the place and time to listen to music. The first successful devices for playing back music were phonographs and gramophones. Those were brand names, by the way. Phonographs were sold by the Edison Company and gramophones were the machines invented by Emil Berliner. The first photographs played Edison's cylinders, but later moved on to play Edison's version of the rotating disc, which was Berliner's idea behind the gramophone. Edison's disk format died out and the machines died out along with them, making Berliner the winner of that format war. This means that today's modern turntables are actually descendants of gramophones, but we still call them phonographs and turntables, which is a bit weird. Anyway, each of these original devices were made of big wooden cabinets and contained either a heavy windup or electric motor. And until the 1930s, they didn't have amplifiers. There was no volume control. Volume was determined by the size and shape of the acoustic horn that led directly from the tonearm. Phonographs and gramophones were hardly portable. Well, they could be, but, well, listen, there was hmv, the British Electronics and Recording Company. They released a gramophone packed into its own sort of suitcase. As early as the middle 1920s, they made this thing in India. Other manufacturers tried something like this, but the HMV Model 102, which first went on sale in 1931, was probably the best of the bunch. In fact, there was a version of the HMV Model 102 on sale until the late 1950s. Turntables with electric motors weren't very practical because they required vacuum tubes to work. They were fragile things, prone to overheating and breaking and burning out. When RCA introduced the 7 inch single in March of 1949, the original idea was to make them playable only on special turntables made by rca. That was one of the reasons for the big hole in the center. These record players were quite small, maybe the size of a squat blender. And that made them kind of portable. But you still had to plug them in whenever you moved them to a new place. It wasn't until 1955, when Philco, the Philadelphia based battery company, put out a transistor based battery powered turntable on sale that you could take your records, you know, 33, 13 LPs, 45 RPM singles and 78s and play them anywhere. They had a built in amp, very powerful, but still, and a modern ish speaker. Oh, and it had a volume control. The price, just $59.95 US which works out to almost $750 today. That much for a bad sounding mono portable turntable? Well, yeah, but it was the height of convenience back then. A bigger success was the 1962 KLH Model 11, a pretty nifty transistorized stereo system which featured a record player, an amp and two speakers tucked into a suitcase design. You still had to plug it in. There were no batteries, but it was pretty portable in the right circumstances. And it got a little bit weird too. Back then. In 1955, Chrysler, Dodge and DeSoto vehicles could be ordered with an under dash turntable. It was called the highway hi fi and it played special 7 inch records made by Columbia records that could hold about 75 minutes of music per side. Now, the audio quality was awful. To get that much music on one side of a record required many, many, many grooves. And you had to get the most out of each groove, which is why the platter spun at just 16 and 2/3 RPM. And the only place to buy a very limited number of highway hi Fi discs was at your local Chrysler dealer. Still, highway hi Fi units were available until 1959 and then RCA got into the act. In 1960 and 1961, these ones played standard 45 RPM records. But because the stylus had to press so heavily on the record to keep from skipping on bumpy roads, records wore out really fast. All right, let's pause for a song about turntables from rancid. A million eyeballs in a play that are smart with all the benches of cyto. One more note about portable turntables. In the middle 1950s, John Koss was trying to get people interested in his idea of a portable record player. As an afterthought, a way to demonstrate the device, he engineered a set of headphones so people could listen privately. His record player was A bust. But the headphones, that was a brilliant idea. And in 1959 the first ever Koss headphones were introduced. And that was the beginning of the headphone craze. Sales of phonographs weren't exactly spectacular through the 40s and part of the 1950s, because radio supplied a lot of the public's musical needs. It wasn't until the hi fi trend, this idea of having full fidelity sound systems in your home took off that we started to get into the modern era of, of record players. Okay, well what about radio? Well, once governments determined it was safe for the public to use radio technology after the end of World War I, private companies started making radios. But most of them were big heavy things containing a big heavy battery. You could move them from place to place, but it wasn't very convenient. And when radios that plugged into the wall came along, well, that tethered most of them in place, so no good. Then came the car radio. Chevrolet was the first to put a radio in a car in the fall of 1922. It was expensive and it was awful. The antenna took up the entire roof. And the cost of this option was the equivalent of $3,000 today, which was quite a lot for a car that cost a couple of hundred bucks. But it worked. It took the Galvin brothers and their new company called Motorola to really get things moving. A prototype was installed in a 1930 Studebaker. And when manufacturers started installing the wonderfully named 5T71 and cars, it cost 130 bucks as an option. That's about $2,000 today. But being able to listen to the radio away from home proved to be very popular. And within a year, Motorola had plenty of competition. And by the middle 40s, 10 million cars were equipped with radios. The era of mobile music had begun. Now I should point out that there were many other attempts at making radio portable during the 20s, 30s and 40s, but none of them were very good. For example, there was something called the radio hat, which featured a radio built into a pith helmet. Ridiculous. In fact, it was made by a company whose main job was making party hats and Hawaiian Leis. It cost about $8 and looked really funny. The big change came in 1954 when the Regency TR1 was introduced. This was a battery powered radio that used transistors, which meant that it could be shrunk down to a size that could fit in your pocket. Weirdly, none of the big radio manufacturers were interested in. So a company out of Indiana jumped at the chance. And on October 18, 1954, the first ever transistor radio was announced, and it went on sale a few weeks later. Now, this new tech wasn't cheap. Retail price was 49.95, which is over $500 today. And if you wanted a headphone jack, that was an extra seven bucks. But once the competition saw the market, potential prices came down. Electrical circuits, whose complex wiring is literally printed on boards, are one of the factors making possible a radio so small that while it can't quite be strapped to the wrist, it can be slipped easily into an ordinary suit coat pocket. Even more important than printed circuits in space conservation are the minute transistors, which perform the same function as much larger vacuum tubes and yet draw only a fraction of the current required by tubes. Marisa Ibuki, the head of a company that made rice cookers in Japan, discovered that AT&T, the inventor of the transistor, was licensing the technology to other companies. His company, Tokyo Telecommunications, set about building a radio called the TR55. Then the company was renamed Sony, and it jumped into the fight in August 1955 with a unit that cost 40 bucks. Then it was $25, and by 1962, anybody could get a portable transistor radio for about 15 bucks. And in less than a year. The first all transistor car radio was developed by Chrysler and Filco. You could get one of these things in your 1956 Chrysler 300 for an extra 150 bucks, about $1,800 today. These days, there are billions upon billions of portable radios in use all over the planet, all descendants of that original Regency TR1. I've said this before, and it's worth saying again. The transistor radio appeared at exactly the same time as this new musical trend called rock and roll. Parents tended to hate this music. But thanks to the transistor radio, this new construct known as the teenager, could listen to their music away from disapproving parents. This was a big part of how rock and roll spread. And thus the transistor radio became a delivery vehicle for this social, demographic, economic, political and sexual revolution that came with rock on am. On am, There's teenage fan club with a song from 1993 about radio called Radio. So by the early 1960s, there were two choices when it came to portable music. A turntable in a suitcase type enclosure that either ran on batteries or was plugged in, and a portable transistor radio. But weighting the wings was a new technology involving magnetic recording tape. Consumers had been able to buy big bulky reel to reel tape machines since the early 1950s, tape was wound on either 7 1/2 inch or 10 inch reels. Big, bulky, not really portable at all. Enter Bernard Cozino and George Isch. Cosino came up with the idea of winding tape onto a single reel, joining the beginning and end and the end of that length of tape into an endless loop. Isha's contribution was putting this mechanism into a plastic case so that your fingers never had to touch anything. Quarter inch wide, magnetic tape running at 3 and 7, 8 inches per second. To play this thing, you shoved it into the slot of a special player. When the tape went round, once a strip of metal foil and later an inaudible tone on the tape signaled to the machine that it was time to stop playing. He called this the Fidela pack. And the radio broadcasting industry went nuts for these things. Starting in the late 1950s and continuing for decades, radio stations played songs, commercials, public service announcements, music beds, jingles played from these tape cartridges that became known as surprise carts. This brings us to Earl Madman Muntz. He sold televisions from his store in Los Angeles, but then he saw carts in action. Why couldn't this technology be adopted for cars? This would be way better than the stupid highway hi fi. In fact, it would open up a whole new market for mobile listing. So in 1962, Earl introduced what he called the stereo pack in California and Florida. There were four tracks. Two matched one side of a stereo album and two matched the other. When let's call it side one was over, Clunk. The machine would realign the playback heads and play the other two tracks. Call that side two. But then a year later, Richard Krause, who was working with Learjet, yes, the planemaker, was looking for a music system for those private jets. And he came up with a new cartridge design that was mechanically better and featured music on eight tracks. This increased the capacity of each tape to about 80 minutes. And he called this the eight track. Great, right? Well, not really, because if the playback heads were misaligned or if the tape didn't run perfectly flat, music from adjacent tracks would bleed into others. You could fast forward, but not rewind. And when the player changed tracks, you got that big clunk. Worse, to make an album fit on an eight track, the running order of the songs would often have to be rearranged so that things would fit relatively evenly across four pairs of tracks on that tape. And the worst of the worst was when you couldn't do that. So a song would fade out, then clunk, and then it would fade back up. Still, the eight track was the first practical and workable way to play your choice of music in the car. And given that FM radios and cars weren't a big deal yet, eight tracks potentially offered better sounding audio than AM radio. And while the tapes did jam, they could take much more abuse than any other existing pre recorded music format. Ford was the first to jump on board with the 1966 model year Mustangs, Thunderbirds and Lincolns. They sold a staggering 65,000 units and from there eight tracks spread to other manufacturers, even Rolls Royce. J Can you imagine a roller with an eight track in 1967 eight track players were available in both home stereo units and portable battery powered units. Radio Shack sold a ton of these things and the first ever known karaoke machine invented by a guy named Dusuki Inui in 1971 used eight tracks. Singing about the eight track experience. That's Jim Bozia from a 2008 album entitled Misadventures in Stereo. The popularity of eight tracks went into decline in the late 1970s. Record stores stopped stocking them, although you could still find them at truck stops for a while. You could be a member of something like the Columbia Records and Tapes club and order eight tracks. They offered them well into the 1980s and as far as anyone can tell the last ever pre recorded major label 8 track release was Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits which was issued in 1987. Although there were apparently some Reader's Digest collections issued in 1988. And strangely certain eight tracks are very collectible. The most valuable of all time is a limited run Frank Sinatra tape that is traded for up to 5000 US. So what killed the eight track? Another better portable tape format? That's next. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal college deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're victorious partners of all time. New friends. You are Gary Desnake and your last name Desnake Dream Team Hidden Habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at Home. You're clearly working at Zootopia 2, now available on Disney. Rated PG. Before we go further into the history of portable music, we have to rewind for an obscure failed format from the middle 1960s. Ever hear of Hip Pocket Records? No, not surprised. At the same time, Filco and Ford were installing tens of thousands of eight track players into cars in 1966, they were also trying to sell Hip Pocket records. These were thin bendable plastic records known as flexi discs. They got Atlantic, Mercury and Roulette Records to release singles this way, selling them for 69 cents at Ford dealerships and through Woolworth stores. Chuck Berry, Tommy James, Ben Morrison, Sonny and Chair, Neil diamond, they all had Hip Pocket releases. These things could be played on a regular turntable. But Philco Ford also made the Mini Radio Phono, a tiny turntable that you could actually put in your pocket. They were joined by another company called Americom, which produced something they called pocket Discs. They were sold only in vending machines, 50 cents a pop. And they teamed with Apple Records, meaning that you could buy Beatles singles this way. It was a nice try, but Hip Pocket records were dead by 1969, just in time for a new format to appear. The cassette. And for this story, we have to rewind to the 1950s. Lou Ottens worked for Philips, the Dutch electronics company, first taking a job as an engineer in 1952. Eight years later, he headed up the company's new product development team. And one other project was a portable tape player, a reel to reel recorder that sold very well. Yet Ottens was dissatisfied. He said, I got annoyed with the clunky user unfriendly reel to reel system. It's that simple. By 1962, he and his team had shrunk the reel to reel mechanism, dramatically encasing it in a wooden case. Its size was determined by the size of a shirt pocket. The actual size was 4 inches by 2.5 inches by 0.5 inches. The tape was 18 of an inch wide, well, exactly 3.81 millimeters. But history has rounded that up to 4 millimeters. It was divided horizontally into four tracks. Left and right channels for side one and left and right channels for side two. It ran at just 11 1/7 8th inches per second, something that initially meant less than desirable audio quality. But that wasn't much of a problem, since Otten envisioned the cassette to be used for simple office dictation duties. High fidelity was not really a priority. The wooden case of the prototype was soon gone, replaced by one made of plastic. A patent followed and the compact cassette, as it was officially called, was unveiled at the Berlin radio show the Funko Stellen on August 30, 1963, proclaiming that this new miniature reel to reel tech was smaller than a pack of cigarettes, which it really was. It's hard to overestimate what a sensation the cassette was. It was so, so small. But Auden's cassette wasn't a slam dunk success as other companies like Grundig and Telefunken pushed their versions of the technology. It wasn't until Philips made a licensing deal with Sony in 1965, giving them the right to use the design for free, that things really began to take off. With support from the Japanese giants, the Philips design was standardized for the planet and and over the decades, more than 100 billion cassettes entered the marketplace. It would be years before better quality magnetic coatings came to market. The original ferric oxide on the tape was eventually replaced by chromium dioxide in 1971, followed later by pure metal particles, greatly improving sound and making the cassette suitable for proper hi fi listening. Dolby Type B noise reduction, another big leap that greatly reduced the inherent annoying hiss of cassettes was also introduced in 1971. And after that, high end cassette machines became an essential part of any hi fi setup. But before then, record labels started releasing pre recorded cassettes. This happened as early as 1965, starting first in Europe under the name music cassettes and then they appeared the following July in North America with 49 titles being released simultaneously. The first pre recorded cassette I can ever remember buying was this year's model from Elvis Costello. It's got endless play on the Roadstar under dash deck I installed in my mum's 1973 Pinto. Starting in the late 1970s. And we'll get to why in just a second. And extending through the early 1990s, the cassette defined portable music cassettes became big business for record companies and stereo equipment manufacturers, including those who specialized in aftermarket car stereos. Not only were record stores selling pre recorded tapes by the billions, but blank cassettes were huge sellers as everybody began to make their own mixtapes. Blanks came in 30 minute, 45 minute, 60 minute, 90 minute and 120 minute lengths designated by the letter C followed by a number. So a 60 minute blank cassette was labeled as a C60. A side note here, this was also a problem for the music industry. At first, pre recorded cassettes were easy to duplicate and the market was flooded with counterfeit releases. And second, the industry did not like it when we made those mixtapes. If you want music on cassette, then you must buy the official pre recorded version. There was a big campaign launched in the early 80s, something called home Taping is Killing Music, which tried to convince us that this practice was not only unethical, but illegal. Naturally, nobody paid attention. In fact, just the opposite. The Home Taping logo became a meme and was used by bands on backdrops and T shirts. The English beats sold blank cassettes at their merch table at their shows in hopes that fans would bootleg the show and copy their records. In 1981, the Dead Kennedys released an EP called In God We Trust Ink. All the music was on side one of the cassette and the other side was left blank with the instructions home taping is killing record industry profits. We left this side blank so you can help. And here's something from 1980. The British band Bow wow wow released a cassette single. Side B was left blank. And that stunt apparently cost them their record deal. But didn't their record company have to approve the release in the first place? Side A of that cassette was this song. It's all about cassettes. It's called C30, C60, C90, Go. It's hard to overstate how important the cassette was not just to music culture. Because they were so cheap and so easily made, mixtapes were traded and smuggled everywhere. Think of all the forbidden western music that made it behind the Iron Curtain and other closed off countries this way. How many couples bonded after mixtapes were exchanged. Mixtapes spread live music, underground music and rap music to the furthest corners of the planet. And at the same time, speeches by radical politicians and clerics were spread on cassette. It's estimated that at least 100 billion cassettes, both pre recorded and blank, were produced during the glory years from about 1980 through 1992. And for a period of time, the cassette was the best selling pre recorded format anywhere. Period. Full stop. Which brings us to portable cassette players. Portable battery powered units first started appearing in the 1960s, but they were bulky and mostly recorded and played back in mono. One day in 1972, a former TV executive named Andreas Pavel went for a walk in the Swiss Alps. Gee, he thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could listen to music while hiking? And this led to the development of a portable personal cassette player he called the Stereo Belt. Basically, this was a battery powered cassette player on a belt around your waist that was connected to a set of headphones. And for the record, the first song he remembers playing on this new invention was Push Push. By Herbie Mann and Duane Allman. Pavel thought he was onto something, so he started a tour of electronics manufacturers. Philips, Grundig, Yamaha. They all got visits, but they all said his idea was dumb. Still, he filed a patent for his invention in 1977 and 1978. So imagine his surprise when on July 1, 1979, Sony started selling something called the Walkman. It was a modification of something called the Pressman, which was an audio recorder aimed at journalists. Maruo Ebuka, the same guy who seized upon the transistor radio, asked his engineers to make him a portable music player that would help him pass the time on those long Trans Pacific flights. The Walkman was designed specifically for music lovers. The original, known as the TPS LP2, was small, light, and came with some incredibly good headphones for their size. It also had two headphone jacks, because the head of Sony couldn't imagine anyone wanting to seal themselves off entirely from the world in a bubble of music. In some territories, the device was known as the Soundabout. In others it was the Stowaway, and in others, still, the Freestyle. But eventually, everything everywhere was standardized as the Walkman. The first model Walkman sold for about $150 in $1979. That's almost $600 today. Even then, Sony expected to sell about 5,000 units a month, which would be pretty good. But Instead it sold 30,000 in its first 60 days. Sony Walkman. You really feel the music with the Sony Walkman. The Sony Walkman is a tiny stereo cassette player with truly incredible sound. Put on a Walkman and see the world in a whole new light. The Walkman from Sony. The one and only. And what if Andreas Pavel and his stereo belt. Well, he sued and lost. Then he sued again and lost. And then he sued a third time and won a share of royalties going forward. And that worked out okay, since by the time cassette Walkmans were phased out, more than 350 million units were sold. Andreas ended up with a payout of about $10 million. And that's just Walkman's. Think about all the other personal cassette players sold by other manufacturers. And because so many people bought Walkmans, they bought more pre recorded cassettes and they bought more blank tapes. The Walkman changed so much, staggering. After peaking in the middle 80s and early 90s in some territories, tapes sold as well as CDs. Until 1993, cassette sales began a precipitous decline in most of the world. They did, however, stay popular in places like Africa and Southeast Asia, where they proved to be able to stand up to the heat and the humidity and the dust. When I was in Bali in 2019, I found a store that stocked hundreds of cassette titles. Cassettes also thrived in Japan. Despite being such a gadget crazy country, some things moved slow, like moving away from cassettes. And cassettes are still very important when it comes to the prison population. Now let me explain that there are companies that make special cassettes without screws and other weaponizable pieces. With over 2 million people incarcerated in just the US this is a big business. Oh piece of the last automobile in which you could get a factory installed cassette player was the 2010 Lexus430SC. Now back to Lou Ottens for a second. He retired in 1986. In 2013 he acknowledged that the time for his invention had passed and that cassettes were old and outdated and obsolete. His only regret seeing Sony introduced the revolutionary Walkman instead of Phillips. But before he retired, Audens went to work on another portable music format, the compact disc. Back with that in a second. In a world where swords were sharp and hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is, two fearless historians, me, Matt Lewis and me Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. So subscribe to Gone Medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or a white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. The next big change in portable music came just as the recorded music industry was dealing with a big post disco crash. For the first time since the Great Depression, music industry profits dropped and a worldwide recession didn't help either. But then along came this new thing that sounded so good that it was guaranteed to get everyone to buy all their old records all over again and at much higher prices. It worked. It was called the compact Disc. Here's how the CD came about. In 1974, a group of engineers within Philips led by Lou Ottens, started to look for ways to improve on the vinyl record. They first experimented with a disc that was about 20 centimeters in diameter, but then they eventually settled on one that was 11.5 centimeters. You want to know why they picked that number? Because Philips also developed the cassette. In the early 1960s. The diagonal width of a cassette is, yes, 11.5 centimeters. Meanwhile, in Japan, Sony was working on digital recording machines and and first demonstrated an optical disc that was 30 centimeters in diameter, the same diameter as a vinyl LP back in September of 1977. This thing could hold 60 minutes worth of music. A year later, they came up with a disc that could hold 150 minutes. In 1979, when Sony and Philips realized that they were working towards the same goal, the companies teamed up to split the cost of research, to share knowledge, and to come up with all the proper standards for making this new music storage format viable. As for the name, that was Philips idea. They invented the compaq cassette in 1963. So it was agreed that the new format should be called the compact disc. They also figured out some of the finer points of the manufacturing process. Meanwhile, Sony, which had a head start in digital storage technology, contributed everything that they Knew. By late 1982, the technology was ready and the first machine, the Sony CDP101, went on sale for about 700 bucks. And along with sounding way better than the substandard vinyl people had to put up with back then, not to mention the awful tape hiss from cassettes, you could instantly skip a song. No more fast forward or rewind. Instant access to any track on the disc. Now, today we take the skip button for granted, but back in the early 80s, I cannot begin to tell you how revolutionary this was. More trivia. The first commercial compact disc was produced on August 17, 1982. It was Claudio Arau performing some Chopin waltzes. We know that this was the first CD made because Arau was invited to the German pressing plant to press the start button to manufacture his discs. This was track one. And the first popular music album to be created on compact disc was the Visitors from abba. The first 50 titles on CD were released in Japan on October 1, 1982. And if we go by the sequence of catalog numbers, the CD at the top of that list was Billy Joel's 52nd Street. At first, CDs were a little delicate if you wanted to play them on the move. The first manufacturers to come with something for the car was Pioneer, who introduced the CDX1 in 1984. Sony had one out at almost exactly the same time, and that same year their Mercedes S Class came with a factory player. The first portable CD player was Sony's Discman, which was called the D50 and sold for $500, $1,100 today, and it came out in November 1984. And for a while, the diskmen and their clones were the best. Okay, they skipped a lot and you couldn't really go jogging with one. Even after severe anti shock technology was introduced. How could that all be solved? Well, with more brand new technology. So far we've covered the history of portable music from heavy wooden box, wind up gramophones from the 1920s through to the radio, the eight track, the cassette and the CD with a couple of detours along the way. All these technologies were fine in their own ways, but they also had their own drawbacks. Next time we'll look at how we made it from the compact disc to being able to choose from tens of millions of songs on our phones with zero effort. Meanwhile, you can get all sorts of ongoing history podcasts through any podcast platform. Just download and go, rate and review if you can because that really helps us out. I'm always updating material on my website, which is ajournalofmusicalthings.com we can also connect through Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and any and all email should be sent to AlanLancross CA. It will be answered the History of Portable Music Part 2 Next Time Technical Productions by Rob Johnston I'm Alan Cross. 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