Yet, in 2005, a New York Attorney General's findings showed that SonyBMG were more than happy to bribe radio programmers to get their artists in rotation. While most major radio stations may not have the freedom to play whatever they want, mainstream DJs used to wield great power, and as Chris Molanphy's great Slate "Hit Parade" podcast pointed out, a stubborn disc jockey's insistence that a B-side or album cut was the "real" hit sometimes paid off huge dividends. While the format was introduced in early 2004, it died out quickly, with only a few DualDisc titles arriving in 2006 and none thereafter.Įven in our current age of endless streaming services, radio still plays a huge part in the music industry, as getting a single song in a Top 40 or key market rotation could ensure play for months on end, if not longer.
Only a scant amount of releases in this format (including Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" and Foo Fighters' "In Your Honor") and most standard CD players (and especially car players) had a hard time recognizing the format or simply wouldn't play. The higher manufacturing cost only accounts for a two-dollar upcharge for most consumers, but the larger issue was selection and user experience. The concept was simple: instead of having music on one side of a compact disc and album art on the other, one side had music while the other had a DVD containing documentaries, music videos, and any other type of fan-baiting digital content.
During this period, several innovations were being tested to "sweeten" the purchase for a customer, and DualDiscs were one such attempt. While the music industry will never be back to its 2000 level of selling nearly a billion CD units, the harshest drop came between 2005-2008, wherein the industry went from moving 700 million discs to half that. While it's easy to write down Napster as the death of the physical release, the truth is that innovations still take time.
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