In 1986, at the end of my first year of university (AKA the three most miserable years of my life), I was 20 and still a virgin. Looking on the brighter side, I had enough of my grant left over to buy my first CD player (strictly speaking I didn’t get a local authority grant as my parents were too well-off, so it was they who funded me, but students of the period always talked about their grant regardless of where the money came from: this was in the heady days before Student Loans).
IIRC I bought my Philips CD150 at what we jokingly called “the local corner shop”, Harrods. I can’t remember the price but I think it was somewhere between £100 and £150; to put this in context, the weekly rent for my room in a hall of residence in South Kensington at that time was, I think, £27. Unlike some of my more audiophile fellow students I had a music centre but luckily it had an Aux input so I was ready to go.
As for pretty much everyone else around me at the time, the first CD I bought was Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits of which I already had a much-played vinyl copy. The album came out in May 1985 a few months before I left home to go to uni and was pretty much the signature LP of that first year.
Money for Nothing was the most successful track on the album (and indeed the band’s most successful ever) and its computer animation video was groundbreaking at the time.