Why did the dial a disc service stop?

Question

Me and my friend were discussing this last night.

You dialed 160 and the same song would play repeatedly. It was handy for standing in a phone box when it rained. Those were the days

Answer 1

I rang the operator about this a few years ago and she laughed for about an hour, and then when she composed herself, said, "Dial a disc!!!???? They stopped that YEARS ago!!!"

I also used to dial up from the phone box on the corner :-)

Answer 2

I remember that. I use to call that as well. Oh that takes me back to the 70s. Are you sure it was 160 you dialled?

Answer 3

The number was 160 in some places, just 16 in others.  The same number was used to announce the cricket scores during important test matches.

Why was the service withdrawn?   Probably because in the later years it simply didn't attract enough callers to make providing it worthwhile.  When Dial-A-Disc started choices for listening to music were much more limited, with numerous local radio stations broadcasting different genres of music still very much in the future.  By the time Dial-A-Disc was abandoned, there was wider choice available from other sources more cheaply than in the past, and paying money to listen once via the non-hi-fi restricted bandwidth of a telephone line just didn't seem quite so attractive any more.

Here's a Dial-A-Disc clip from the past!  

http://www.tones.plus.com/sounds/menager...