Not precisely connected to all my musings below, but this story claims that CDs "could be history in five years." The story describes a new storage and access hardware technology far more advanced than the CD. These fingertip-sized "memory tabs" will hold over a gig of data and would be write-once and then read-only, like non-rewritable CDs are now.

The implications are fairly clear: if there are no more CDs, then digital distribution of music will be everything. I'm not sure what this will mean for brick and mortar music retailers if they have essentially no product left to sell. That's a can of worms that I'm totally unprepared to open.

As I said, I think the writing is on the wall. We have to adapt or become a tiny niche market.

its always been like that hasnt it?
with new technological advances being made and the record industry straggling to catch up and make a load of money on it...i dont think this will change anything for the major companies, they got so much invested and so many diverse ways of earning money.

Now for us, small bucks music earners, things will change yeah. For better or worse i cannot say.

I, myself, am quite hopeful for the future....

I'm hopeful certainly. Not terribly optimistic, but hopeful.

I suppose though that optimism or pessimism don't really matter much. I just hope that I'm attuned enough to the changes over the horizon; I'd rather work with those changes than against them.