Music didn’t go digital with streaming. Music went digital when a medium arrived that supplanted vinyl records and cassettes: the compact disc. In Italy the beginning of what was in effect a revolution (not for nothing our houses, if you are over 40, are “haunted” by CDs that we rarely listen to now); that beginning has a precise date. May 2, 1983. I found the date in a very detailed article for the press by one of the great experts in Italian musical history, Piero Negri. “The commercial Big Bang of the new format”, writes Negri, “in Italy took place on May 2, 1983, when 180 titles were placed on the market, mostly of classical music and mostly taken from the PolyGram catalog, a musical subsidiary of Philips” .
In the course of that year 400 thousand pieces were sold; in 1990 the overtaking on vinyl, 15.8 million against 14.6 million. The turning point of the compact disc came from afar: it was from the ’70s that people worked on an optical reading disc to reproduce music; there was obviously a trade war between Philips and Sony and then of course there was an agreement that established among other things that the compact disc could hold 78 minutes of music (enough for Beethoven’s entire Ninth Symphony).
1983 was the year of the Big Bang, as Piero Negri writes, in the United States a few months earlier than in Italy (and in Japan already at the end of 1982). Since then, CDs have dominated the market for twenty years. Then came the streaming and they went down. Piero Negri, without citing the source, says that his definitive disappearance was expected in 2022, on the occasion of his 40th birthday. But in reality, for reasons that should be investigated, sales of CDs in 2021 for the first time in 17 years have returned to growth and in several advocate a return of the CD.