Bump. Why? 'cause I can, and I am the Norton.
Vinyl wear is certainly an issue. WI someone came up with a better material that still produced the same organic sound? Already happened several times before, e.g. when vinyl itself replaced lacquer for records.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
Essentially, rather than a needle, a laser would be used to play the vinyl. This would mean no wear, and so vinyl records could theoretically last forever.
Problem was, they were and are (I think) expensive, and by the time they came out, they had to compete with CD's, which was a laser war the older format couldn't win. They also have the problem, I think, of not being able to play any color but black vinyl.
However, if those problems could be taken care of, the cost cut down to something reasonable, and CD's delayed, I think it could have helped.
But I agree the problem vinyl faced was portability. Certainly the portable radio was around for quite a while, and during the age of vinyl, and that filled a niche for a long time, but by the time of portable music storage devices, something which could offer the functionality of vinyl -or greater functionality- and reasonable sound quality was probably always going to be a major competitor to vinyl if not something which rendered it obsolete. 8-Track kinda started that, although it was very limited itself (I don't believe it had the ability to fast forward or rewind, and the sound quality was booty), Cassette stood on an even playing field, and CD knocked it out of the park and proved a superior sound quality (granted, I'm not a fan of the digital format; some CD's are too crisp, and feel like a knife stabbing my ear. The "fatness" of sound is something I find desirable, and CD's have taken notice of it and tried to do it since their initial introduction).
However, we've kinda gone to the zenith with portable. It got tinier, and tinier, and tinier, until now it's just microscopic bits of data in iPods; we don't need CD's and Cassettes to put into our Walkmen's or whatever. And that's why vinyl is coming back in a big way, even if just as a niche; music storage no longer needs to be portable because we've reached the zenith of portable, and we don't need anything but the players to store them. Maybe if that leap of portable music to pure data were made sooner it could have saved vinyl.
Some of you may say that should kill
any music storage format, but I'd point to vinyl now as proof that that isn't true; there's portability, but then again there is also music as an experience; something to sit down and listen to.