10/07/2024
25 years ago today, RCA introduced the Lyra mp3 player -- more than two years before Apple's first iPod. The RCA Lyra launch was just three months after Napster's "file sharing" (some say file stealing) service launched. CD sales plummeted, but eventually the music industry came to embrace streaming as it looked past physical album or disc sales as more consumers signed up for ongoing subscriptions.
We at RCA/Thomson had high hopes for this new category of audio products, a music player with no moving parts. It seemed like magic to hold a Lyra in your hand and push the play button, and then to hear your selections without a moving cassette tape or spinning CD to eat up battery juice. A tiny company called Diamond Rio had introduced the first digital music player, raising the hackles of the music industry.
Digital music mp3 technology was created, in part, by a Thomson subsidiary and we owned the underlying technology that could take a digital audio recording and toss out bits that might never be noticed by a casual listener.
To promote the new category to a younger, hipper audience, I hired a nature and catalog photographer from Denver who suggested we shoot product photography "in action" in the mountains near Red Rocks Amphitheater. A college intern of mine (target market) picked the Denver-area male and female models who would appear in our first promotional materials, including football player and later actor Alan White. He would go on appear, briefly, on the "General Hospital" soap in New York.
In the end, Apple chose a different path -- investing far more in marketing than we could ever afford. About half the consumer's cost of an iPod (and today's iPhone) is spent on marketing to attract buyers.
Apple itself started phasing out the standalone iPod 10 years ago, with the last model disappearing in 2022.
But a quarter century ago RCA was among the first to delight listeners who could finally take along their own personalized music mix and keep moving!
