http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20080922/TEC.Music.on.Memory.Cards/

In a nutshell:
Music sold on memory cards eventually taking the place of cd's.

That's all I need. Music on tiny little memory cards that are easily lost (or if you have small children, carried away and hidden, or even worse, swallowed).

I'll stick with CDs, thanks.

Maybe but the sales guy is wrong, a new format will not make people buy music in any format if they can download for free. People would go into music stores and actually buy cds if they lower the price and have a better selection of music to choose from, do what Journey did, sell a dvd or maybe another bonus disc and keep it reasonably priced and people will go back to buying cds, not in large unrealistic numbers that took place during the 90's but they will be able to move units, 449 million cds sold is still a respectable number for a format that is suppose to be on its deathbed, people are hungrier for music now than at anytime in music history, but record company executives have to use some imagination and business smarts, I applaud them for exploring technology but they also need to realize their is an untapped music market for a product that already exisit.

Bootleggers will go crazy with this.

I don't even have anything that would play these damn, stupid memory cards. Why the hell would I play it on a cell phone anyway? Until cells come with subwoofers, I'll stick with a stereo.

I want cds.

This is for the "ringtone music" crowd...mass-marketed, energy-drink sponsored "artists"...this will not replace CD's for genres like Metal & Indie Rock...

Bring back cassettes!

CDs will go away, but never completely. Vinyl and CDs will remain for many, many years. But labels and bands will try new things. Some have already tried selling albums on thumb-plugs, which I've found hilarious because they priced them at around $40! Haha. A for thinking outside the box; F for being a stupid ass about it.

But eventually something will come along and change how everything operates. I envision music stores going away in place of music portals, little machines you walk up to, hook your MP3 player into, and download new albums. I know they have similar things now, but they're not universal enough, covering all brands of MP3 player.

Imagine being able to register your collection somewhere for a fee, some place that acts as a global music database. Pay them an annual fee, more like insurance, and if you someone lose your music collection—hard drive failure, operator error, fire, whatever—you can download everything again for "free" (outside of the annual fee). That would put the CD business in ruin.

I think manufactured cassettes pretty much went out the window around 1994 or so.

So even if Schbopo is really 15, he'd have been in diapers then.

I suppose it's possible he heard cassettes from someone else's collection...

He's 12. He'll tell you 15, but he's 12.