The answer: in prisons, where CDs are routinely banned because they can be shattered and the shards refined into shivs.
MP3 players are unavailable in most prisons, as are, one imagines, turntables. California-based entrepreneur Bob Paris got the idea five years ago to sell cassettes by mail to the 2.3 million people locked up in federal, state, or local prisons across America. Now he finds himself with a thriving analog business in a digital music industry beset by piracy and plummeting sales. See this Reuters article for more details, including Paris’s best selling albums.
Recent years have seen the resurgence of vinyl record sales (outside of prisons, of course), and even punch cards seem to have been saved from the dustbin of history. The telegraph lasted until 2006 before the medium finally died, but its clipped vernacular lives on in text messaging.
Are there other examples of media that should have gone extinct but found a nice niche in which to survive?
(HT: BoingBoing Gadgets)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
VCR’s which use VHS. How else could I tape Oprah, which comes to me via rabbit ears (antenna)? I’m sure there are others in my situation.
If CDs can be made into weapons, I’m suprised nobody has thought of banning taking them on planes. Aren’t they a bigger risk than having 100ml of toothpaste in a 150ml tube?
A cassette tape deck came standard with my 2002 Subaru. No CD player. Cheap audio books for me!
Re:Pagers are still frequently used by doctors and drug dealers.
Interesting–he started stockpiling cassette versions of albums a few years ago. But that certainly limits his catalog.
I wonder–would he run afoul of piracy issues if he purchased new CDs, copied them onto tapes, and then destroyed the CDs? Obviously, the costs would increase, both because CDs generally cost a lot and because the transfer process would be a time-consuming pain in the butt. But it would expand his offerings.
A simple analogue in another industry is re-binding companies like PermaBound, which buy paperback books from publishers, cut the covers off, and then re-bind them with very durable library bindings.
As mentioned, pagers are used by doctors. They are also used in large chain restaurants.
“MP3 players are unavailable in most prisons…”
Um, why?
They’re relatively cheap and can provide a lot of content — a 1GB MP3 player costs about $50 and has a relatively high capacity.
And they’re rather tough to weaponize (I suppose you could garrote someone with the wire for the earbuds maybe).
Though not exactly “media,” blocks of ice were the primary source of cooling for many parts of the world for quite some time. With the advent of mechanical chillers, the ice industry has tapered off, though blocks of ice are still bought and sold to be carved into ice sculptures.