Did the CD have a positive or negative impact on society?
When the CD was first created, it was simply intended to be a superior way of listening to music, and at first it was. However overall the compact disc caused more harm than good. Firstly it opened the door to internet piracy, which lead to extreme money loss in the music industry. An analysis from the Institute for Policy Innovation reveals that global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, costing 71, 060 Americans their jobs, $2.7 billion loss in workers' earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes. After everything the invention of CD's has clearly resulted in more money loss than gain. Secondly the damage that fabricating and destroying CD's has caused on the environment is both irreversible and detrimental. Now that CD's are becoming less popular many are being thrown away and becoming part of landfills, over 5.5 million software packages are sent to incinerators and landfills every year in the United States alone. There is less and less profit to CD's and yet the losses are only growing. The compact disc is becoming an unnecessary aspect of our culture with no real purpose at all. McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message" would suggest that the compact disc may have been a form or technological media, but the true media was in the music or files on the compact disc. McLuhan believed that a medium is anything that mediates our interaction with the world or other humans, and because the music was the reason people bought CD's it is the true medium. Despite all the negative effects of the CD its intentions of spreading music were successful. The CD changed how we listen to music today and began the technology that brought us from the record player to the walkman to the ipod. Overall the CD effected society more negatively than positively but it will always be an important part of our culture and history.