Objection: Minidisc was a successful consumer product, for the few short years between its 1996 renaissance and Moore's Law rendering it obsolete. Just not in the way the record companies hoped.
Objection overruled. The Minidisc never got much traction in the consumer market, although it was ubiquitous in the pro market, much in the way Betamax fared. I suspect (?) that the consumer Betamax peak (which almost certainly exceeded the Minidisc market share) probably occurred earlier in your life, making it less evident? Only a suggestion.
I didn't even have a telly until Betamax had failed. One of my brother's friends parents had one, which was considered a tragic novelty.
But in my teens I watched Minidisc go from a convenient alternative to Fidelipac and hand-spliced open reel tape for theatre and radio, to the preferred portable music format amongst my peers
[1]. What was notable was that (outside the studio) this was almost entirely portables
[2], and I think I saw a pre-recorded Minidisc in the wild once.
That may not have been reflected in overall market share, but I expect it would have replaced cassette, with cheap recorders becoming ubiquitous, if MP3 and flash memory hadn't rendered them irrelevant in the early 2000s. It was a good tech, with natural consumer appeal. The main barrier was price (not least because you effectively needed a CD player to go with it). I had a conversation recently with a friend (a few years younger than me) who called me 'retro' for having a cassette walkman in secondary school - I think she straddled the transition from MD and mainstream CD-R to MP3 players.
(AIUI Sony shot themselves in the foot by making the data version deliberately incompatible with the music discs; they might otherwise have scooped up the Zip disk market too.)
[1] Tech-savvy middle class teenagers. A few were unfortunate enough to have already invested in portable CD players. Cassette remained popular amongst those who weren't that interested in music, had access to a car, or didn't want an expensive walkman.
[2] I knew a couple of people at university had integrated sound systems with a MD recorder, and then a playback-only walkman.
