THE COMPACT DISC is, literally and figuratively, a mirror reflecting the power of intellectual property in late 20th-century society, and a prism refracting it into the early 21st century. Physically more robust than vinyl and—at least at its inception— less prone to copyright infringement than the audiocassette, the introduction of the CD created an unprecedented flood of profits for the recorded music industry. This unanticipated windfall financed intense vertical and horizontal integration within the sector, and gave rise to the expectation that the good times would last forever.

However, the CD is just the physical medium for the delivery of unencrypted digital content, and its development supercharged the revolution that would become central to the digital media age we live in today. The ability to detach the tangible expression—that is, the content—from the tangible object—the shiny Mylar disk— meant that the CD eventually took away all of the benefits that it initially conferred on the music industry. In providing the unencrypted digital content that came to populate peer-to-peer systems, torrents, and streaming services, the CD's mirror-like image masked the danger that lay a few microns under its surface.

Intellectual property protection has been central to the music industry for centuries. Copyright on sheet music in England goes back over 200 years. But the nature of the protection and the methods of infringement of the early days of music protection were utterly different from those that the CD created. The act of copying-out sheet music by hand was time consuming, whilst access to printing presses required commercial investment. Just as was later the case with early sound recording cylinders and records, making copies of sheet music required industrial machinery. The initial focuses of musical copyright and its enforcement were aimed at regulating commercial rivalry, and piracy was defined in terms of infringement for commercial gain.

The 1930s saw the development of audiotape, but this technology was not generally available to consumers; it was only in the 1960s that eight-track tapes and later still the compact audiocassette became widely available to the ordinary user. By the 1970s, the proliferation of home taping was a central concern to the music industry, and so the development of the digital compact disc—created independently initially by Philips and Sony, but then commercialized as a collaboration between the two companies—was seen as a godsend by the industry.