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"The long and lackluster life of the MinDisc is finally coming to an end. Sony is reportedly planning to end shipments of its MiniDisc players in March after more than 20 years. \nLike many reading this, my first reaction was shock \u2014 not shock about the news that the MiniDisc player is about to be discontinued, but shock at the realization that the device is still around at all. The MiniDisc is very much of another era \u2014 the pre-iPod period \u2014 when the biggest innovations in the music world were things like better anti-shock protection for portable CD players so you could walk around without songs skipping too much. And even then, the MiniDisc seemed destined to be a fad.\nSony originally launched the MiniDisc in 1992, but it only sold 50,000 units in the first year. The problem was that Sony priced the device way too high (more than $500) and, as The Guardian put it in an article last year, struggled to \"lure teenagers away from cassettes and CDs.\" Fast forward a few years. In 1998, Sony decided to effectively re-launch the MiniDisc player with a $30 million marketing campaign, which focused on promoting the product as a recording device that could supplement CDs rather than replace them.\nOm Malik, who went on to found GigaOM a few years later, summed up the sentiment at the time in a piece for Forbes:\nWell, just when you thought CDs were the last word in hip audio technology, Sony has decided to bombard us with the MiniDisc\u2014again. Half a decade ago Sony introduced the MiniDisc (Philips introduced a competing product called the Digital Compact Cassette) to much critical fanfare. Both were hailed as the next big thing but crashed and burned commercially. Americans simply didn't want to buy them. We had just accepted CDs for crying out loud and now they wanted us to switch again? \nSo what kind of sucker actually fell for Sony's marketing campaign and believed MiniDiscs just might be the future? That would be me.\nAround this time, I was transitioning from middle school to high school and just starting to develop my own taste in music. So what if that included bands like Third Eye Blind and Live\u2014 bands that seem as dated now as the MiniDisc \u2014 at least it was my music and not my parents' music. Though I don't remember the exact date and place where I first saw the player/recorder, it was likely during one of my weekly trips to browse CDs at Circuit City (another relic of the era) with my father. There, among the bulky Walkman players and expensive CD players, the MiniDisc looked sleek, portable, relatively cheap and, most importantly, new. It struck me as a way to truly differentiate my music experience from my father's.\nFor the better part of two years, I was a MiniDisc evangelist, somehow convincing several of my closest friends that it really was the future. My friends and I would spend weekends together biking to used record stores nearby and buying up cheap CDs by the dozen. Then each of us would head home and make mix tapes of our favorite bands on MiniDisc, which we would trade with each other on the bus to school during the week. I still have many of these MiniDiscs in a shoebox in my parents' house, and I can trace the evolution of my musical tastes through them \u2014 from generic pop like Matchbox 20 to grunge rock like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains to throwbacks like The Beatles and David Bowie.\n\nFor me, the thrill I found with MiniDiscs wasn't distancing myself from my father's way of listening, but rather replicating it under the guise of a new technology. My father had hundreds if not thousands of cassette tapes that he had recorded over decades for car rides and his long daily commute to work. Growing up, he had often recorded songs straight from the radio and traded those tapes with friends and family \u2014 his generation's version of p2p file sharing. He put incredible time and care into recording these tapes, plotting out the number of songs that could fit on each side, writing out track listings by hand and organizing the tapes alphabetically and chronologically. \nI was brought up to believe that music is its most rewarding when treated as something precious and deeply personal. MiniDiscs provided my friends and I with a way to do that. \nIt wasn't particularly easy to record MiniDiscs. There was no quick and simple way to \"burn\" another copy and the discs didn't work with other existing music technology at the time. Yet, for a brief period, I viewed all of these negatives as positives. Each MiniDisc I made \u2014 flaws and all \u2014 felt like it had been created with care, and the simple act of trading discs with friends carried more weight because the discs themselves were unique and irreplaceable. \nWhile this made for a meaningful music experience for me, it didn't make for a good business model for Sony. The company was once again pushing a proprietary format at a time when consumers were about to move in the compete opposite direction thanks to the rise of MP3 players, CD burners and eventually the iPod. It's no wonder, then, that it has joined the ranks of LaserDisc and the Walkman, which Sony started phasing out in 2010. \nMost of my friends abandoned MiniDiscs for CD-R players by 2000 and I eventually followed suit. I still listened to my MiniDiscs in private from time to time as well as sneaking in some of my father's tapes. Then, a couple of years later, I cashed in my piggy bank of change to buy a second-generation iPod and left my MiniDisc days behind. With each new device, music consumption got noticeably easier, but in the back of my mind, I've always felt that each made music appreciation more difficult. I've discovered more music through services like Spotify and Pandora than ever before and had easier access to these tracks thanks to my iPhone, but none of these listening experiences feels as memorable to me now as the day my friend passed me his Radiohead MiniDisc (Vol. 2) on the bus and I listened to it on repeat for days.\nImage courtesy of Flickr, tompagenet "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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