Stealing Xanadu and the Evolution of Plastic in Music

By Marcus Eriksen, PhD, Scientist and Co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute

40 years ago, I got busted with an 8-track tape of “Xanadu” in my pants. It was 1982, I was 14 years old and in love with Olivia Newton John, who sadly passed away last week. I was the last kid in my neighborhood with a hand-me-down 8-track player. The world had moved on to cassette tapes, so when I saw this vestige of music in a local department store, I employed the 5-finger discount, which cost me an hour in jail to think about it.

New thoughts arise four decades later.

 In my nearly 20 years of research on ocean plastic pollution with the 5 Gyres Institute, I’ve had hundreds of conversations about solutions that often go back and forth between technological fixes and legislation to phase out packaging. It’s a lot of both, with a little clean-up in between. As I write, world leaders are negotiating a UN Global Plastics Treaty. That international law will be groundbreaking, but I can’t help thinking that innovation and entrepreneurship have and will play a key role. Let’s look at how this shaped the material use in music delivery.

Innovation throughout the last century steadily brought plastic to the music industry, but in the last 20 years it has mostly taken it out. However, this decline in plastic waste has shifted to electronic waste — and the associated metals and chemicals — which brings another set of environmental and social problems. Still, from phonographs to Spotify, the sheer volume of materials is far less.

It began in 1877 when Thomas Edison invented tinfoil cylinders to create the phonograph and recorded “Mary had a little lamb”. A decade later, Alexander Graham Bell invented the Graphophone using wax cylinders.

Shellac discs began to replace cylinders in 1906, when the Victor Talking Machine Company debuted the Victrola. In 1948, Columbia introduced the first 12-inch 33-1/3 rpm LP vinyl record. Millions of tons of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) were consumed in the decades that sold billions of vinyl records.

While vinyl records will probably always have a cult following, it was in the early 1960s that recordings on magnetic tape debuted the 8-track cassette. Soon after, the smaller cassette took over in the late 70s and early 80s. Both were encased with polystyrene (PS).

Things went digital with the advent of CDs, those polycarbonate (PC) compact discs the diameter of a grapefruit. While billions were sold, they were relatively short-lived, arriving in 1983 with a steep decline in sales by the late 1990s. It wasn’t just the plastic in the disc itself, but the long-box packaging that it came in. The long box was a theft-deterrent made from polyethylene (PE) or polypropylene (PP) that weighed more than the CD itself. By 1990, it was estimated that long boxes were responsible for a whopping 18.5 million pounds of trash per year.

With the dawn of the internet came Napster in 1999, with the sharing of music across digital platforms. While you still needed a device to listen to music (Is your old iPod in a desk drawer somewhere?) and a computer to upload and download shared music files, the world of music packaged in plastic was coming to an end. Today, streaming music makes up the majority of the consumption of tunes today, with the global market in 2020 yielding $13.4 billion — or 62% of the total music industry revenue.

And what of the future? With your shuffled playlist on your phone, there’s no need for dedicated devices or external records/tapes/discs/modems to store music. Will the Cloud hold it all for you in the future, or will a company Neurolink beam music directly to your brain? Who knows, but I can share that I just bought that 8-track of Xanadu on eBay for $16, four decades after my shoplifting adventure. I don’t have an 8-track player, but with a quick search I can watch Oliva and Gene Kelly on roller skates dancing to the title song on YouTube.

Whether it’s new materials to package the things we want, digital services that eliminate most material consumption, or new business models of reuse that make buying stuff obsolete, it is the combination of smart policy and a level playing field for innovation to flourish that will solve the plastic pollution problem. 

As for Olivia Newton John, my childhood crush, rest in peace. You are loved by many.