My understanding is the Magneto-Optical properties of mini-disc are quite archival. Having retired my box of minidiscs last year, the ones I tried all still played.
The quality was very good, (Could not tell the difference from the CD, Sony optimized compression for quality, thinking people cared about it..then 128kbps mp3s showed up). And discs always beat tapes for convenience...
Oh sure, I'm British and have a minidisc in a box somewhere with my old mixes recorded at home. Just that, well, they're
Radiohead and DATs were better for audio quality.
I don't think the internet killed the minidisc (internet connected devices only came long after minidiscs were gone). CD-R and flash memory probably did.
> internet connected devices only came long after minidiscs were gone
The CD-R was already there, but more importantly Internet formats had happened. The advent of the internet made people switch to the MP3 as the primary medium for popular music consumption, because it was easy to move on a still-pretty-slow network.
At that point the market went about finding the fastest way to deliver MP3s "from modem to ears". Minidiscs were better than CD-Rs in that regard (they were R/W, compact, and didn't skip; whereas RW formats for CDs were bad, fragile, expensive, and prone to failure), but still nowhere as good as an actual hard drive in your pocket (an mp3 player) with its high transfer speeds and ever-increasing capacity.
In the timeline without the internet, people probably don't care for MP3s and have gone for "something like the CD but smaller and RW", i.e. the minidisc.
I'm not sure, once you had cheap storage, I think many would just start ripping their originals to disk and trading over sneakernet. And MP3 made sense as a way to squeeze more tracks into the player.
Minidiscs came well after CD-R. They were smaller (as was the portable player), held more data (lossless songs), and didn’t skip. The MP3 player that was basically a hard drive with a wheel, and then a phone, killed minidiscs...
