Status quo of digital music world
IEEE Spectrum magazine runs a feature article on the state of music and current digital formats. They point to an interesting phenomenon in the digital music world that Steve Jobs emphasized as well: for the first time in music history, the next big format was not about better quality (SACD and such) but about better portability (MP3).
It was only five years ago that the music industry was facing a civil war over the next-generation disc-based music format—the successor to the wildly successful CD. At that time, hardly anybody doubted that the music would be encoded optically on a round plastic disc the size of a CD.