Thirty years ago, on October 1, 1982, the first CDs and CD players were officially sold in stores. The first CD sold was Billy Joel's 52nd Street.
Although I am, and always have been, a huge music fan (and purchaser), I was fairly late to the party when it came to CDs. Through all of high school I stuck pretty closely to my record albums (and 45s!), and spent a lot of time recording the albums onto cassettes so I could listen to them on my boombox or Walkman. I also bought a lot of cassette singles. Remember them? (Man, I'm old.)
When I graduated from high school, I received a boombox with a CD player in it, which necessitated buying my first CD. It was Document by REM.
One of the reasons (truly) I went to GW was that we had a Tower Records on campus. But even though I had a CD player once I got to college, I still found myself buying more cassettes than anything else. And that really continued until they stopped producing cassettes on a regular basis, because I didn't have a car with a CD player until the early 2000s. (I did have one of those portable CD players you plugged into your cigarette lighter but it never worked really well.)
Now, of course, CDs cost more than it does to download the entire album on iTunes. It will be interesting to see what the next musical phenomenon will be...
What was the first CD you ever bought?
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