About two weeks ago, the Compact Disc celebrated its 25th birthday. It's amazing to see how things have changed since. What considered to be a revolutionary technology in the 80s, and was made mainstream in the 90s is already fading away...Many factors caused the descent of the CD, but the major one was the MP3 format which came out in the mid 90s and became popular with the penetration of ADSL into households all over the world (And of course with the advancements of hardware such as larger storage devices that allow users to maintain huge libraries of music and faster CPUs that can actually play MP3s and allow the user to do other things as well...).
In addition, the ease of distribution (both for the vendors and the users) is simply a huge leap from the CD era: You hear a song that you want? You don't have to go to the nearest CD store (which are quite empty nowadays...), you just go to iTunes or another vendor and download the song. Also, the track is available on your computer or MP3 player, and you don't have to change CDs etc - we don't even think of these things today, which is a great sign of technology acceptance.
What does it all have to do with mobile? Well, I believe that mobile technologies will play (and already are playing) a big part in the next evolution of digital music. People (and especially teenagers and young adults) like their music to go with them. Music is one application which is in sync with the handset capabilities and form factor.
Unlike games & videos - bigger is not better: You don't have to have a big screen or other hardware that is not in sync with the essence of a mobile phone: You can output music in great quality via the headphones, and have a lot of storage with a memory card (Today 4GB cards are not rare, and it will only grow).
And since people don't like carrying a lot of stuff, but they won't go anywhere without their mobile phone - The MP3 player as a standalone device is short-lived, and will be assimilating in mobile phones (And this is already happening).
And the great thing about an MP3-player inside the handset as opposed to a standalone device, is music distribution: The handset can connect to the Internet and download songs. This is a huge advantage: If you are on the go, and want to hear a song you don't have/own, you can download it - and this is the real deal: Even after MP3s were widely used, you still needed to pre-download your selected music to the MP3-Player (Or a few year before that make a mix-CD with your CD burner) - Now you can not only hear music on the go, you can also get music on the go (And there's an Israeli startup called Hingi that allows users to download songs they just heard in the radio/TV even if they don't know the name of the artist/song).
Even Apple, maker of iPod, the most popular MP3-Player is foreseeing this trend and therefore invested a lot of resources in the iPhone. The ultimate MP3-player cannot stay disconnected - it has to be able to give the user the whole experience.
Of course there's the issue of piracy, which is bothering everyone in the music industry (After they had a few relaxed years when the CD came out, and before CD-burners were widely available...), but frankly, the mobile can handle DRM issues even better than the PC (And still I foresee a different business model for music consumption in the near future).
BTW - ADSL also pushed out the CD as a dominant way of distributing software: It is easier to distribute software over the Internet without any need for physical media, and sizes of hundreds of MB can be downloaded easily and faster than ever.
P.S. - As you probably noticed I haven't written here a lot lately, and this in part due to preperations for my 30th birthday which was yesterday... I just hope not to be outdated as the CD...
