MiniDisc, In Memoriam.

The MiniDisc, or MD, was a marvel of engineering that made sharing music easier than ever. And yet, this is probably the first time you’ve heard of it.

Written by Wonjune Lee

Illustrated by Roberto Soto

The MiniDisc format was released in 1992 by Sony as a replacement for the aging compact cassette format. It was a marvel of engineering, a 2.75 by 2.75 inch square that could initially hold up to 74 minutes of music in a digital format. The digital format included a table of contents that you might see on a Compact Disc (CD), meaning a user wouldn’t have to rewind or fast forward to get to the track they wanted. MDs also supported higher quality audio, offering an audio bitrate of 292 kilobits per second. (In comparison, Spotify’s “Normal” audio quality is currently set to 96kbit/s.) Even now, the MD’s small size and high build quality stand out as amazingly futuristic, and it is fascinating how Sony’s engineers were able to fit so much high quality music into a portable format three decades ago.

The MiniDisc was full of forward-thinking features that tried to address the inconveniences of the compact cassette format. First, it was extremely easy to rip and burn (download and upload) media with MDs using portable MD players. 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. Just rent the new Nirvana album from the local Blockbuster, burn it onto an MD, and return the CD. Voilà! (Almost) Free music.

On top of that, it was also extremely easy to modify track names and track ordering on an MD. 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. (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. For reference, an iPod Nano released in 2012 could only play music for 30 hours.

Comparing 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. 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. 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.

Yes, even with all its impressive features, MiniDisc never really got off the ground, only achieving modest success in the Japanese and British markets. U.S. 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. 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. Even with these restrictions, however, only a handful of music was released on MD, and prerecorded MD albums are extremely rare.

There were, of course, other factors that contributed to MiniDisc's market failure. The growing availability of CDs, as well as the format’s awkward position in the market as a middle-child format stuck between the affordable and widely supported compact cassette and the more premium compact disc all influenced its poor sales performance. Even so, the MD seems to have been killed by the industry in vain, as services like Napster and Limewire popped up in the late 1990s, exploding the popularity of internet music piracy anyway. If the MD had been allowed to exist naturally, it’s interesting to imagine how it would have affected the world of piracy, the iPod revolution, and physical musical formats into the present day.

While MiniDisc failed to revolutionize music, it is still a fascinating format. Cassette tapes, the format MiniDisc was meant to replace, were used extensively to mix and match music, so much so that the term “mixtape” is still widely used today. The ease of burning and organizing music on MiniDisc was clearly designed to make it a worthy successor, and it is sad that these forward-thinking features had to wait an extra decade to become mainstream. Now, we live in a world where playlists can be shared with a single tap of a button, but it’s hard not to wonder whether something has been lost. The physicality of MiniDisc and other formats meant that it was impossible to hand off music to a friend without an extensive, gushing conversation, and that the act of making the perfect mixtape was something that required a lot of care ranging from digging through old records to copy from, organizing tracks just right, and creating the perfect label. The simplicity of sharing music in a streaming world is extremely convenient and much more accessible, yet, despite its undeniable ease of use, something feels lost in translation.

Physical media will probably survive in small niche communities, but their mainstream ubiquity will be missed. The MiniDisc was their last prince, the end of a grand dynasty that ruled music for over two centuries, poised to use its impressive, futuristic yet practical innovations to continue that reign if not for its untimely demise. Rest in peace, MiniDisc. You deserved better.