I think your assuming the everyone wants to put their entire music collection on an SD card, and then they either needs to spend a fortune on a large card or they need to compress the music with lossy compression such as MP3 to fit them all.
But I personally don't feel I need to take my entire collection with me - it is 1.2 Tb as ALAC and just over 2 TB as AIFF. I have a 400gb SD card in my phone with my entire Jazz collection on it with over 1000 albums. I have another 400gb SD card in my M0 with about a third of my music collection taken at random. I use iTunes with a smart playlist that includes everything whose genre contains 'Jazz' or 'Bossa Nova', and another smart playlist which gives you random selection of tracks which take up a given amount of space which I set to 380gb. I use an android and MacOS program called 'iSyncr' which can sync these playlists onto the SD card in a mobile phone, which I can then either leave in the phone or put it in the M0. I don't usually bother selecting individual albums on my phone or M0, and just run them jukebox style with shuffle play. When I was using a 64gb card then maybe after while some tracks got repeated, but I think once the SD card is 128gb or more then that is pretty much good enough for me. The two 400gb SD cards were about 180 euros altogether which I think is really good value, when you consider what I've spent on an album collection of about 3000 albums at maybe 10 euros each.