8 tracks were a convenience, nothing more; never were a hifi choice. They worked barely well enough in mobile settings, but never sounded as good as a high quality cassette or reel to reel (best of all). The problems with tape is that they are not forever, and needed a highly mechanical unit in top shape to keep sounding good. The CD was to be the end game; I remember being at some show where the presenter played a CD, took it out of the machine, threw it across the room, picked it back up, and put it back into the CD player, while saying "these discs are indestructible and will last forever" or something to that effect. There will be those who, for whatever reasons, will never go to only streaming - those who resent paying every month for a service that yanks away all of your music if you don't keep paying, those who think physical media has a quality that's not present in streamed data, those who already have all of the music they listen to on some media and are not interested in anything new (or spending money for the same songs on yet another format). In any event, most likely there will some other way in the future to get your music that might make all of the previous ways you listen to music obsolete.
