Given that Dire Straits had made their name by offering a smartly dressed hybrid of jazz and blues right in the middle of the new wave era, they weren't the band you'd expect to be in the vanguard of new technology a few years later. Yet their fifth album, Brothers in Arms – musically rather poppier than usual, but hardly cutting edge – was the one that introduced the public to the compact disc, and consequently became the first album to sell 1m copies in the new format, helped by another innovation: the cutting-edge animation employed in the video for the album's big hit single, Money For Nothing.

Compact disc players had been available since 1982, but their uptake had been limited mainly to classical music fans, with rock labels slow to recognise the potential of the longer playing time and superior audio quality. Brothers in Arms, with its clean, precise production, was the perfect advert for CD – it was also the first album to be recorded entirely digitally – and it became the default demonstration disc used by shops to persuade customers to spring for a CD player. It didn't take long for the record companies to realise the CD wasn't just a means to sell new music at a higher price than before. By reissuing back catalogues with the promise of perfect sound for ever, they could persuade fans to shell out all over again for albums they already owned. The era of label gluttony had begun.