The rise, fall, and rise of portable MP3 players

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We are spoiled for choice, musically. Most of us walk around with access to hundreds of millions of songs in our pockets. But it wasn’t until 1998 that portable digital music was even a thing. Before that we lugged booklets full of CDs on the bus or stashed a handful of cassettes in our backpacks. With the advent of the MP3 player in the 2000s we were soon able to carry massive libraries of music everywhere we went — over 1,000 albums’ worth depending on the file format and the size of your MP3 player.

The MPMan F10 is generally considered to be the first commercial MP3 player. It was roughly the size of a deck of cards and looked like an oversized pager. It launched in Asia in March of 1998, but it barely made a blip on anyone’s radar. It was the Diamond Rio PMP300 that broke through in the West a few months later, in September of 1998. It was slightly larger, and its design more closely resembles what we envision when we think of a media player (namely the iPod). But even then, it drew more attention because the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Diamond Multimedia in an attempt to stop the spread of MP3s.

The F10 and the PMP300 were, unsurprisingly, primitive by today’s standards, shipping with just 32MB — yes, that’s megabytes — of storage. That tiny amount of built-in memory only allowed for around 12 songs to be stored on them. They held less audio than a CD and generally sounded worse. But it wasn’t that big of a limitation, in comparison to the nightmare that was the UI on their tiny monochrome LCDs. Plus, you could expand storage on both using SmartMedia cards if you really needed to.

Eventually, some companies addressed the storage issue by swapping flash storage, which was still relatively limited at the time, for traditional spinning-disc hard drives. The Creative Nomad Jukebox, for instance, had a 6GB drive inside. It also had a more familiar design modeled after portable CD players. But that made it bulkier than the competition; it weighed a shocking 14 ounces. Unsurprisingly, it also failed to usher MP3 players into the mainstream.

It wasn’t until the introduction of the iPod in November 2001 that the golden age of portable media players truly took off. By 2007, roughly 20 percent of Americans owned a personal media player. Other companies, including Microsoft and Creative, tried to carve out space for themselves with Zune and Zen lines, respectively. But Apple’s iPod was the dominant force in the market, accounting for over 70 percent of media player sales.

While 20 percent isn’t ubiquitous, the iPod and the digital music revolution certainly felt inescapable in the 2000s. Bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails were experimenting with pay-what-you-want digital releases. Napster taught everyone the phrases “file sharing” and “peer-to-peer.” And Apple’s iconic ads combining silhouettes and white earbuds were everywhere.

The personal media player’s spotlight was relatively short-lived. While Apple didn’t fully discontinue the iPod lineup until 2022, it retired the Classic model in 2014 and cut the Nano and Shuffle in 2017, leaving the iPod Touch — essentially an iPhone without the phone — as the last iPod standing.

By 2011, the writing was on the wall as iPhone sales eclipsed iPod sales for the first time. The portable media player market shrank quickly as modern smartphones replaced flip phones and BlackBerrys, and music consumption moved away from purchasing CDs or digital downloads toward streaming. What was, at its peak, a $21.6 billion industry in 2008 had collapsed to just $613 million in 2012, according to research firm Mintel.

It’s difficult to get reliable numbers for the size of the digital audio player market these days. Some research firms lump all media players together, regardless of whether they’re audio or video, streaming or offline. Others that do track audio-specific players as a separate market segment can’t seem to agree. Some report that it’s a $180 million-plus industry on the rise. Others say it’s only a $1.2 million market and it’s shrinking. One thing is certain, though: Portable media players have become a very small niche.

For most of the last 10 years, dedicated portable music players were primarily the realm of audiophiles. Companies like Sony and Astell & Kern have been steadily releasing high-end audio players that can sell for well north of $3,000. Sony’s NW-A306 is the only device offered by either company that even approaches a mainstream consumer price, at $399.99.

These devices aren’t just more expensive, they’re more complicated than the iPods of yore. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are a given. They feature large touchscreens and high-end digital audio converters. They also often run Android, opening them up to streaming apps like Spotify and Qobuz. Sony has fully embraced the iPod Touch model, giving its players full access to the Google Play store.

The sky-high prices and embrace of apps has led many to reject these players. Instead, those looking for an offline listening experience free from notifications and algorithms have turned to the past. Vintage iPods still fetch hundreds of dollars on eBay. An entire cottage industry has cropped up around modding them — adding modern features like Bluetooth and USB-C, replacing the dying hard drives and batteries, or just customizing the appearance.

As popular as the iPod was, the world’s supply of working used units will eventually run out. As they age, batteries will stop holding a charge and spinning drives will fail, and most people don’t want to open up a piece of delicate electronics or mess with a soldering iron. But the renewed interest in iPods is starting to drive up prices on other media players, and modders are now swapping new drives into Zunes and selling them for hundred of dollars on eBay.

With Google searches for “MP3 player” nearly tripling since last year and The New York Times running trend pieces about the iPod resurgence, a number of companies and startups are trying to cash in. Chinese manufacturers have flooded AliExpress, Temu, and Amazon with a ton of dirt-cheap players and shameless iPod knockoffs.

Wildly successful crowdfunding campaigns, like that of the AP30 Music Boy, show there is pent-up demand for retro portable music players. But most out there aren’t moving the needle much in terms of design or usability.

Sleevenote is one startup that’s attempting to break the mold, but its success is far from guaranteed. It’s a startup from musician Tom Vek that embraces some modern conveniences like syncing over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth headphones, but skips on any extraneous features like streaming, apps, or games. It swaps scrolling text lists of artist names for a grid of album art. It’s highly visual, and attempts to re-create the experience of paging through a CD booklet. It also has limited integration with a host of digital music storefronts like Bandcamp, Subvert, Bleep, Qobuz, Amazon Music, and more.

Vek has a promising-looking concept on its hands that actually approaches the portable media player in a fresh way. But the bulky Day One edition still has a lot of kinks to work out, including disappointing battery life. (I’ve been testing one for a couple of months now.) Plus, it’s currently sold out and the company doesn’t know when the next batch will be made available.

There’s growing anti-streaming sentiment, and the slowtech trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. But no obvious heir to the iPod throne has stepped in to fill the gap in the MP3 player market.

It seems unlikely that the MP3 player will see a resurgence on the scale of vinyl or even CDs. In part because, for whatever convenience advantage an iPod might have over a limited edition LP, it lacks the collectibility factor. And that has been a major driver of the physical media resurgence, as evidenced by the fact that, while Gen Z and millennials might be buying up CDs in record numbers, half of them don’t own a CD player.