“Tis a true story, Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony personally specified that the CD was to be long enough to hold a complete 9th as it was his wife's favorite piece of music. The original Redbook CD spec was just short of 74 minutes long, (a tad over 700 mb).
Another story as I heard it was that Michael Jackson wanted to get one of his double albums on a CD and that resulted in pushing the capacity up to 80 minutes. I recall that when the first 80 minute blanks hit the market they were almost $100 each.
Having written all this, I went went over to Wikipedia only to learn that they have a totally different take on all of what I just relayed, so I could have been totally wrong about most everything I just said, but then again it is Wikipedia so take all this with a really big grain of salt.