Sony executive Norio Ohga explicitly demanded in 1980 that the new Compact Disc audio format be expanded from its original sixty-minute capacity to exactly seventy-four minutes for a highly specific reason.

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Sony executive Norio Ohga explicitly demanded in 1980 that the new Compact Disc audio format be expanded from its original sixty-minute capacity to exactly seventy-four minutes for a highly specific reason. He wanted to ensure that the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony could fit onto a single uninterrupted disc without forcing the listener to get up and change it. The physical dimensions of the primary audio format for an entire generation of music lovers were dictated completely by the length of a classical piece composed in 1824, permanently linking nineteenth-century orchestral music to your scratched copy of a Limp Bizkit album