So, after computer games and MP3 downloads, interactive consoles and streamed tracks on tap, recorded music, the lifeblood of maybe three post-war generations, is about to get its final comeuppance. Mobile phone applications, it appears, will crush the CD by 2012 with around 50% more sales that year than our well-loved sound carrier. Where has the world got to, we may well wonder.

We could turn round and say that this has happened so many times before that the death of one format is just the preamble to a new one. In the 1890s, Edison fought Berliner when the new fangled disc took on the clunky old cylinder. ‘Mary had a little lamb’ sounded sweeter on the new version and the days of the original phonograph were strictly numbered. It was VHS v Betamax only in top hats and frock coats.

Traditional folks in the music publishing biz didn’t take too much notice. They thought they had the copper-bottomed system that would resist the new technologies. In 1892, just as the hardware wars were about to kick off, the tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley chalked up their first million-selling piece of sheet music when ‘After the Ball’ by Chas K. Harris proved the hit of the decade. The fact that some of us will still know that song is patent testament to its amazing longevity.

Before long though even the sheet music salesmen would get rattled. By the time the 10″ shellac disc was the master of all it surveyed, it seemed that gramophone records had won the day. But the Wall Street Crash crushed the nascent record industry and it was only the jukebox – tens of millions of discs played in Wurlitzers and Nickelodeons at 5¢ a pop – kept a few survivors afloat.

Three companies were big enough to ride the Depression: RCA, EMI and Decca became the first firms dubbed majors as smaller ventures died by the hundred.

The war changed things in many ways. First, strikes by songwriters and musicians at the start of the 1940s over royalty payments and fees, opened the door to hundreds of composers who had been previously frozen out of the Broadway and Hollywood monopoly.

Blues writers and country singers, jump jivers and R&B rockers, jazzmen and Latinos, got a foot in the door and the middle of the road mellowness of Porter and Gershwin was challenged by the raw roughness of a dozen minority genres.

How did Little Walter and Muddy Waters, Ruth Brown and Big Joe Turner become household names – at least in hip households? Well, a new wave of independent labels – Atlantic and Chess and Modern – took on the big boys and by the 1950s, with their specialist knowledge of styles once at the margins, were scoring more hits than the fat cats in New York and LA.

But it was another format change, a product of war-time research that would really change the playing field. Vinyl, an offshoot of the lab work that invented plastic, was an amazing breakthrough for the smaller outfits. Shellac was so brittle it cost a fortune to distribute; a vinyl disc could be stuck in a cardboard envelope and posted to a hundred DJs – and arrive in one piece.

The 45rpm, seven inch record would be the other landmark change in the 1950s – the product again of boffins struggling with the problem of creating playback machines that would reproduce those tight grooves and offer listeners something approximating fidelity.

After that, format scraps became almost the norm – singles v albums, stereo v mono, cartridges v cassettes, CD v DAT, DCC v MD. But these head-to-headers were always about making music available to us. In many ways, the fan of rock or soul, pop or reggae, tended to be the ultimate winner as the business battled for our bucks.

But the news that phone apps are going to generate some $17b of trade in a couple of years time to only $13b for the CD is another flashing light that warns the existing majors – Universal and Sony, EMI and Warner – that the game is probably up.

The two biggest – Universal and Sony – have interests that go well beyond recorded music. Universal has internet concerns, Sony will probably cash in on the applications boom. But those two grand old names of popular music – EMI and Warner – with most of their eggs in one basket, look in real danger. A merger is mooted, as it has been several times over the last decade, but you can’t help feeling that the CD is almost dead in the water.

It saddens me because as I download this app and that app and then scour what else might interest me, I quickly run out of choices and options. Adding a  Tesco Clubcard or a novelty spirit level on your iPhone just doesn’t have the buzz of picking up a new album from Blur or Oasis, Springsteen or Radiohead. Apps are set to be the new century winners but the land of musical entertainment is, I fear, going to turn into a pretty arid place.