CD Player Day is celebrated on October 1st

Between audio cassettes and the MP3, the compact disk was the most popular way to listen to music in parts of the 1980s and 1990s, and every CD needed a CD player!

On October 1st, 1982 the first ever commercially available compact disk player was released in Japan. The Sony CDP-101 was released for around 168,000 yen, or what would translate to over $1750 in today's US dollars! That unit resembled a VCR.

Later, the laser-based music storage medium would become cheaper and more mainstream and CD boomboxes and portable CD players became more common.

By the turn of the century, the CD had mostly replaced the dying audio cassette format. However, CDs were soon overtaken by digital music and the MP3 player, although CDs still sell to a certain extent.