3 ms·

MiniDisc was a failure compared to its contemporary competition, namely CDs. I doubt you could find any country where MiniDisc sold even half as well as CD/CD-r

MiniDisc was a failure compared to its contemporary competition, namely CDs. I doubt you could find any country where MiniDisc sold even half as well as CD/CD-related products. IIRC in its total lifetime only a few tens of millions of units were sold. That's not an abject failure but those are rookie numbers compared to CD players and CDs. They were rare in the US in part because they were very expensive. A portable MD player was hundreds of dollars where a portable cassette player with an AM/FM radio built in was $20-30. They stayed expensive even as CDs and CD players (including portables) got less and less expensive. Very few albums were released on MD in the US so even if you invested all the money in the format you were paying $30-50 for "import" discs.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
You're comparing different markets. Virtually everyone who used MD had both. They didn't compete. CDs were high quality but large and worked well at home. MiniDiscs were small, portable, and recordable, and mostly replaced tapes, not CDs. Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself. And my point is that model doomed MDs in the US. Everyone* in the US had a cassette player. Every car radio shipped with one, every stereo unit had one, and portable units were cheap and plentiful by the beginning of the 90s. There were also a huge number of pre-recorded albums available on cassette including stuff like books on tape. In the 80s and the first half of the 90s portable music meant a cassette deck. When MDs came out in the US they were incredibly expensive, more expensive than CD players of the time. If you had a CD player at home you could make a tape off it with a ubiquitous tape deck then play it in the same. A MiniDisc player was in the best case just a sound quality improvement over cassettes with a huge price premium. By the mid-90s portable CD players could be had for $100 while MD players were still several hundred dollars. In 1995 you could spend a hundred dollars and take your CD collection with you without spending hours transferring them to MiniDisc. At least in Europe and Japan a MD owner could go to the store and buy pre-recorded albums for their players. I don't know if cassettes skipped those regions in the 80s but the US was lousy with them. * for some values of everyone
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Car culture vs public transport culture, isn't it? CD is (somewhat) fine on car, but a bit big to carry. Anyway I feel the US don't like any "mini" thing.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

You're comparing different markets. Virtually everyone who used MD had both. They didn't compete. CDs were high quality but large and worked well at home. MiniDiscs were small, portable, and recordable, and mostly replaced tapes, not CDs. Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself.

giantrobot 4y ago
> Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself. And my point is that model doomed MDs in the US. Everyone* in the US had a cassette player. Every car radio shipped with one, every stereo unit had one, and portable units were cheap and plentiful by the beginning of the 90s. There were also a huge number of pre-recorded albums available on cassette including stuff like books on tape. In the 80s and the first half of the 90s portable music meant a cassette deck. When MDs came out in the US they were incredibly expensive, more expensive than CD players of the time. If you had a CD player at home you could make a tape off it with a ubiquitous tape deck then play it in the same. A MiniDisc player was in the best case just a sound quality improvement over cassettes with a huge price premium. By the mid-90s portable CD players could be had for $100 while MD players were still several hundred dollars. In 1995 you could spend a hundred dollars and take your CD collection with you without spending hours transferring them to MiniDisc. At least in Europe and Japan a MD owner could go to the store and buy pre-recorded albums for their players. I don't know if cassettes skipped those regions in the 80s but the US was lousy with them. * for some values of everyone
- fomine3 4y ago
  Car culture vs public transport culture, isn't it? CD is (somewhat) fine on car, but a bit big to carry. Anyway I feel the US don't like any "mini" thing.