In issue 37, we predicted the music industry would find a more efficient way of distributing music. Five years later, our predictions have come true. Now we look ahead another half decade.

It was March of 1994, and the Compact Disc was still new enough to pass for a novelty. Most people still didn't own a CD player, figuring they would buy one once they "came down enough" in price. And there we were, in UHF No. 38, predicting the death of the CD, going so far as to show its tombstone, with a date of death of 1999. Could the CD really die so quickly?
     Well, not quite, and the article itself made that clear. We noted that the LP's Golden Age had lasted 40 years (1948-1988), but that accelerating changes might cut the CD's dominance to a mere 20 years. If that is so, the CD would be replaced by 2003. And, we added, "it is clear that we will see its replacement appear in less than five years."
     And we were right. But what is the replacement for the CD? Is it the DVD, in either of its incarnations? Perhaps not. Let's check back that 1994 article again:
     If you're a large record company, the CD has some serious drawbacks. It may be cheap to make, but it is very expensive to distribute. The disc must be shipped to the world, and the profits must be shared with record stores. Distribution is also time-consuming: it is exceedingly difficult to get a new record into all of the world's record stores so that you can benefit from a promotion campaign. Delays cost sales. Some consumers can't get the record, and on the other hand some stores will have records left after the boom subsides. Those will be sold at a discount, killing off future profits from the sale of that artist. Thus far there has been no choice about this mode of distribution, but soon that will no longer be true.
     "Soon" is now.
     The audio DVD is clearly not the solution, because--from the viewpoint of record producers--it has all the drawbacks of the CD and then some. It actually costs more to make, which exacerbates the cost problem, and its emergence would mean double inventory for record stores. At the same time, well over 99% of consumers believe the CD is perfect (the ads say so, don't they?), and they see little point in buying a "better" disc. The mainstream audio industry, by bringing out equipment that sounds a little worse each year, have killed off the potentially lucrative market for a better source.
     So what is the replacement for the Compact Disc?
     One word: MP3.
     You've probably read lots about it, and perhaps even tried it. You need to know what it will do to our sources for recorded music. With that in mind, we will look back at what we predicted half a decade ago, and we will look forward another half decade. This is the future.

The Global Record Store
     That was the name we gave to the commercial distribution system that would emerge within a few years. Amazingly, we were wrong on hardly any of its details. Those that are not yet realized will emerge in the next five years. We'll explain why.
     The device we visualized (which we reproduce unmodified) is shown on the next page of the print article only. There's no weird technology in it: it is an amalgam of an electronic organizer, an ink jet printer, and a MiniDisc recorder. It doesn't yet exist, but it will, possibly this year.
     Bear in mind that when we published this article, the World Wide Web existed but was largely unknown even by the pioneers already using the Internet. We didn't anticipate the Web growing so quickly to become a communication system that, in industrialized countries, is nearly as common as the telephone, and so we assumed that the device would have a proprietary interface. The little screen's interface uses hypertext, and it is of course similar to that of the World Wide Web.
     What you see on the screen, aside from the link bar on the left, is a set of hyperlinks to the catalog, the title and artist list, and also to a page showing new recordings. You can't spend ten minutes in an Internet café without understanding at a glance how it must work...

Sorry, the illustration from five years ago can be seen only in the print version of UHF. This is a dense, six-page article, and we can pretty much guarantee you won't read about this elsewhere.Would you like to read the full text, with illustrations? Click here to order the print edition of UHF No. 57.