I recently began the process of digitizing my CD collection. Music stored as electrons is the future. The compact disc is already outmoded, a fact that was brought home to me lately by touring the Washington DC car show last month -- many cars, especially those with a younger demographic, don't offer a CD slot any longer.
I approach the task with reluctance, because I've already made this "tech-tonic" shift several times in my lifetime. LP records were the only medium for buying music in my high school and college days, but even then their problems were legion: too easy to scratch and warp, too voluminous and heavy.
The easy access to tech gear during my short stretch in the military led me to the magic of reel-to-reel tape; after mustering out I could (and did) put as many as five or six LPs on a single reel of tape, a medium that was less subject to damage. Not too much later, the cassette was perfected enough to become a hi-fi medium, and it had the added advantage of being playable in the car, so for a few years I used both tape media indiscriminately (but I still had to buy LPs, record them, and discard or sell the LPs).
Finally came perfection: the compact disc. More compact, almost indestructible. I remember buying my first ones in 1986. Ultimately the weight and volume of my old tapes started to become a nuisance (not to mention the high cost and decreasing availability of equipment on which to play them). I began at some point to replace my taped music with CD versions of the same; recording to CD wasn't possible then for the consumer. About a dozen years later, I just pitched out all the tapes - many of which hadn't been played in ten years - and donated my last reel-to-reel tape recorder.
So the CD has had a surprisingly long run for a consumer technology - almost 30 years - but clearly now, its time is past. No more clutter of physical media at all, just little blips stored on your computer, or better yet, in the "cloud." (Well, OK, yes, you can transfer those blips to tiny physical media like SD cards, music players, or flash drives when/if you want.)
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