@Keith: There are still walkman cassette and cd players. Problem is you have to tote around a box full of cassettes where ever you go if you want to listen to more than a dozen or so songs on your trip to where ever that way. Which is why I like my 4gb Diesel flash drive plugged into the stereo in my truck. It has about 300 songs on it right now and about 3.5gb of free space left. I just haven't bothered adding more music to it in a while. And my cell phone, as crappy as it is, doubles as an mp3 player, with a headphone jack and a 32gb micro sd card, so I can put whatever music I want on it and go anywhere that my truck wont go. Much less bulky than a walkman and a bunch of cassettes. 

The digital age has allowed a lot of artists an avenue to distribute their music and other works for free and get their names out there in ways that were never possible before without some significant investment in cash. Back when I was in high school, had the internet and digital music existed the way it does today, all my friends could have recorded their music for free and shared it with whoever they wanted without having to drum up the $1500 to $2000 it would have cost them to get a handful of demo tapes recorded. That kind of money isn't easy to come by now and it definitely wasn't easy to come by 20-25 years ago for a bunch of teens or early 20s guys recording in their parent's garage. Now you can spend $20 on a stack of 100 blank cds and burn your own album off your pc, if you want to distribute actual copies.

Indeed. I just came back from an extensive business trip where, due to the amount of time I was spending on planes, waiting around for meetings, and nights in hotels with nothing to do, I read a lot. It worked out to about 15 books, all of them on my e-reader, where I have several hundred other books so wherever I am, I not only have something to read but if I get a recommendation for something new, as long as there's a digital version of it, I can get it so long as I have some kind of connection to the internet. No need to order and wait for it. No need to try and find a bookstore (and where I live...no bookstores. At all.)
And among those books are works by writers who never would have gotten a chance before the advent of digital. Because the cost of digital distribution is effectively 0, not only can individual afford to "publish" without needing to go through a publishing company, actual publishers can take risks on new authors who can get enough attention to warrant hardcopy publication, or to raise the knowledge of older writers no longer in print.