For those of you who do not know, I should start by outlining what MP3s and Minidiscs are.

MP3 stands for MPEG (that is, the Motion Picture Experts Group) audio layer three, and is simply a method of compressing sound and music to take up less hard drive space. Modern advances in technology, however, have allowed the invention of the portable MP3 player, so that you can download (or record) MP3 files and play them wherever you want.

Minidiscs, however, are simply a music storage medium, like tapes or CDs. They were invented when people realised the main flaws with portable CD players -- you can't record your own CDs, and they tend to skip when you move. Although the first problem has been solved by the invention of the CDR, CDs still skip¹. The minidisc is similar in nature to the floppy disk, which suffers no skipping problems and can easily be written to (test it -- try accessing a floppy while shaking your computer up and down, then try it with a CD and notice the difference).

Anyway, many people (including a famous record company) have said that audio CDs will be obsolete within a few years. Presumably, if this is because of MPxs popularity, the same will go for minidiscs (or MDs, as they are known). Many other people have said that this is the same format battle as has raged for years -- VHS vs Betamax, CDs vs cassettes, Sky vs BSB and many others -- and will end soon enough with no real change, but this in effect is a new battle: that of physical data exchange vs the Internet.

On the phyisical data exchange front, it is my belief that DVDs will become the only format necessary as soon as they are writable, but the file format used will vary over time: the new MPEG-4 format for compressing video, the soon-to-appear audio format to replace MP3, and beyond, but all this will only give an advantage to the Internet over physical data exchange. However, the Internet will not rule the race for many years: the failure of NCs² and the fact that we still share data on floppies rather than by email are testament to that.

In the end, though, once modem speeds increase to near-instantaeous levels, the Internet will become the only entertainment channel -- we will be able to listen to any piece of music, or watch any film, just by asking the computer. We will all leave our physical forms behind and become non-corporeal life-forms floating through the existential astral planes of metaphysics.

But don't hold your breath.