The death of a format is always painful to go through. 

Just before I was born, reel-to-reel passed on.  Just as quickly as it shot up like a rocket, 8 tracks feel back to earth.  And while you can still see it shuffling around nursing homes and other haunts, cassette tapes are for all intents & purposes expired as a format.  Bound books have staved off many infections, but there seems to be a betting pool for when it finally passes off to a better place.

Robin Hilton at the ALL MUSIC CONSIDERED blog asks the painful question:

R.I.P. The Compact Disc, 1982-2008?

image from jbaylies

Comments

[Sarah Dylan Breuer]

I don't think the CD is dead quite yet. With really good headphones (especially amplified properly), I can tell the difference between CDs and MP3s, even when the latter are relatively high-quality. And lossless digital music takes up too much space on today's affordable hard drives to be practical for music nuts like me. As it is, I had to move my iTunes library to an external 160 GB hard disk, and it's almost full! (Admittedly, some of the music on there is my own recorded loops, but more of it is ripped from my CDs or legally downloaded concert bootlegs.)

I'm guessing that what will finally get me to get rid of my CDs and not buy more will be when portable mass (1 TB or more) data storage becomes much cheaper.