> Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself. And my point is that model doomed

> Pre-recorded MDs didn't sell well because that wasn't the point. You'd buy the CD album and then copy it onto MD yourself. And my point is that model doomed MDs in the US. Everyone* in the US had a cassette player. Every car radio shipped with one, every stereo unit had one, and portable units were cheap and plentiful by the beginning of the 90s. There were also a huge number of pre-recorded albums available on cassette including stuff like books on tape. In the 80s and the first half of the 90s portable music meant a cassette deck. When MDs came out in the US they were incredibly expensive, more expensive than CD players of the time. If you had a CD player at home you could make a tape off it with a ubiquitous tape deck then play it in the same. A MiniDisc player was in the best case just a sound quality improvement over cassettes with a huge price premium. By the mid-90s portable CD players could be had for $100 while MD players were still several hundred dollars. In 1995 you could spend a hundred dollars and take your CD collection with you without spending hours transferring them to MiniDisc. At least in Europe and Japan a MD owner could go to the store and buy pre-recorded albums for their players. I don't know if cassettes skipped those regions in the 80s but the US was lousy with them. * for some values of everyone