The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which established that all digital audio recording devices must include copy protection and that manufacturers of those devices must pay royalties to record labels and artists. record labels were not keen on releasing music for formats that would allow for easy ripping and burning of music, and had already actively sabotaged Sony’s earlier attempt at replacing the compact cassette: the Digital Audio Tape format.
Yes, even with all its impressive features, MiniDisc never really got off the ground, only achieving modest success in the Japanese and British markets. It highlights just how similar in concept MD players were with iPods, which is all the more surprising, considering that MiniDisc was a complete failure, while iPods changed the music experience for an entire generation. Everything from the dancing, the camera angle, the use of bright colors, to the text highlighting how many songs the devices can play, is eerily familiar. For reference, an iPod Nano released in 2012 could only play music for 30 hours.Ĭomparing MD players to iPods seems especially apt in the context of the latter commercial, as it is extremely similar to the famous ‘silhouette’ iPod commercials of the 2000s. (This was three years before iTunes was released, allowing similar music management on Mac computers, and ultimately the iPod.) Some MD players, like the one in this 1999 commercial, had a continuous playtime of up to 42 hours. As shown in this commercial from 1998, it was possible to connect MD hardware to your PC and modify track names and track ordering with simple, easy-to-use software. On top of that, it was also extremely easy to modify track names and track ordering on an MD. Just rent the new Nirvana album from the local Blockbuster, burn it onto an MD, and return the CD. Many models offered both read and write functionality, meaning that if a user connected it to a CD player, they could easily copy a CDs contents and burn it onto an empty MD. First, it was extremely easy to rip and burn (download and upload) media with MDs using portable MD players.
The MiniDisc was full of forward-thinking features that tried to address the inconveniences of the compact cassette format.
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