History and progression of music storage media (as I take it)

Well I somehow want to get this out of me. Not my best day.

So here's my look on the history of music storage. It blends some truth with some mockery and personal comments. This is not intended as a precise and accurate scientific reference.

Well.

• ? BC: When people started to make pottery, it was said that somehow one guy recorded sounds into the pots (while the mud is still soft) through some form of engraving. So Mythbusters busted this one, but those guys aren't really scientific references either. So that.
• Middle Ages and Renaissance, early 19th Century: Demar* of sheet music. Not really a storage media since you needed instruments to play according to. Apparently back then there was no standard like today's sheets. But back then (mostly 19th Century) if you wanted music, it's either going to the theater (opera house) or play.
• Late 19th Century: Edison invents the wax-covered cylinder. Also improved the light bulb due to a general afearness of dark. Sound was recorded by yelling at a needle (or a membrane connected to the needle) scratching the wax. Wasn't really reliable since wax is soft and fragile.
• Somewhere between the above and early 20th Century: Phonograph or vinyls. Back then it was shellac (not the modern term of shellacking) and speed wasn't the same between companies, hence demarring the format war as we know it. Much harder than wax and later improved into vinyl, this can be played over and over again (for about 100 times) and retains good quality. First gramophones have huge needles and a flare speaker. Many were hand-cranked. Later on, much more sophisticated and advanced turntables came into service. Many with strobe speed trim, the strobe light was attached to the mains (wall power line) and is synchronized with the switching frequency. But wall power was never a steady 50 or 60Hz, later some units had separate frequency boxes. A bit later than that came quartz-locked turntables. Turntables and the whole vinyl system was heavily physical, the needle (stylus) needs to be frequently replaced, for one. The cartridge body had alignment and azimuth issues, with the two screws and that headshell mount. Later came P-mounts which eliminated some variables, but it became synonymous with "cheap" as today's USB turntables are all P-mounts. There was the belt- and direct-drive, but today the high-end tables are mostly belt (or string) driven for some reason. Isolation of vibration? Went all the way into the 80's and saw limited use to this day.
• Same period: Magnetic storage. Tapes. There was the wire recording then magnetic tapes. Came R2Rs (reel-to-reel), huge, not really portable, lots of drive parts. I personally don't know which one is better, tape or vinyl, but I know that during that period, most purchasable music pieces are recorded on vinyl and not reels of R2R. Came Nagra with their unrealistic stuff. Some time during the 70's Sony came up with the compact cassette (or tape cards), which was the first time anyone can listen to music, pocketed. Granted there was the transistor radio, but that was merely a receiver from stations that played either R2R or vinyl. Came TPS-L2, came Walkman. Compact cassettes saw much development, such as the engineering marvel that is Dolby NR system and Class IV tapes. Sony's Super Metal Master, the very best blank IV tape ever made, had a ceramic tape shell and aluminium case. These still go at an equivalent of $150 USD in Mainland China. Rapidly eliminated due to some anti-piracy lobbying, which is the fear of high-quality dual-deck tape decks, which allowed a commercial tape to be copied almost perfectly to blank tapes. That and general tape deterioration. Walkmen crammed lots of drive mechanisms into a relatively small box and failures are common. Reliable units, such as the D6(C) and DC2, were (and are) very expensive for the time. With the elimination of vinyl Sony saw that analog is no longer a sustainable way, thus came DAT. Again due to lobbying (DAT permitted perfect digital copies), Sony introduced SCMS but their machines (M1, D8, etc.) saw little use. DAT remains a niche market today and a brand-new TCD-D10 Pro can go for and equivalent of $1200 USD in Mainland China. Compact cassettes are rare enough, even Class I tapes are hard to find. Old Walkmen are unlikely to be repaired (lucky Quebec City still has a place).
• Digital music: First came the Compact Disk in 1982, a collaboration between Philips and Sony. The first portable CD player, the Sony D-50, was gigantic and is described as a "galactic battle-ship" by some collectors. After that came Discman, which back then were luxury pieces of electronics. CDs allowed near-perfect music storage and playback. A laser is used to retrieve the bumps and pits. No physical contact is made except for the center axle, so CDs can be played forever if the material did not rot. The summum of technology in a portable was the Discman D-555, with dual DACs and digital-everything (volume, EQ, etc.). The decline of portable CD quality was the the introduction of anti-shock mechanisms (and general outsourcing into China). Seeing the size of CDs, Sony introduced the MD or MiniDisc, which uses magneto-optic Kerr effect to store music (and data). This was about parallel with DAT. MD players still see limited use today and a good MZ-RH1 can go more than an iPod. Speaking of iPods, at a time came pocketable solid-state players. That was when Thompson introduced MP3 format and the Lyra (now RCA), that or the PJB-100. Actually back in '76 there was a design for a solid-state DAP that had roughly 4MB of storage. The idea was that music stores are equipped with large rezos* and people can walk in and get one tune. Solid-state mems grew rapidly. Came the iPod. A short period was the Micro Drive, a hard disk the size of a CF card an failed often. Generally shaking the iPod can bring it back to life. Very small hard drives in DAPs are still used due to the excellent price-to-GB ratio. Computer RAM sticks are going at cabbage prices so one day we'll see a 256GB flash DAP for about $200.
• 2100: Singularity. People carrying the Library of Congress in their pockets. That or the ear-pods seen in Doctor Who.

Glossary

*Demar: Converted from the French word démarrer, which describes the action of a combustion engine igniting, among other things (generally setting in motion a chain of events). The word for describing the action of feeding power to a piece of electronics is allumer, which is the equivalent of turn on in English (but you don't turn on a war).

*Rezo: Converted from the French word réseau, which is sort of a metaphorical spider-web linking together many computers (or general electrical hardware such as lights), either by hard line or by air signals.

PS. Yeah I skipped 8-tracks, but I'm not personally familiar with it. Less so than gramophones.