Were they really? I didn't really buy music until '97, but when I was trying to buy cassettes then, there was a tiny selection compared to what was available on CD at any store I went to. It's hard to imagine the music industry doing a complete 180 in just two years or less, with cassettes outnumbering CDs in '95. I do remember '95 was when practically every kid I went to school with wanted a portable CD player for their birthday or Christmas. I don't know if that would've been their first CD players, or if they already had boomboxes with CD players and just wanted a portable version. (In my case, my first portable CD player was my first CD player period. Didn't get a PS1 until '99. But my brother had already bought a boombox with a CD player a good bit prior to '97 and had a collection of probably at least 50+ CDs by then.) I'm sure the CD player of the PS1 offered some draw, but it wasn't even the first gen to offer CD players, since Turbo CD and Sega CD have built-in players too, so I'm guessing a lot of people already had at least one device that could play CDs by the time they bought a PS1.