The demise of the music CD inevitable?

Actually, on some of my old Time/Life CDs,  after I ripped them using Jriver to my solid state hard drives, strange things happened. Jriver said some files were unplayable, sometimes not at first, but after they were on my drives for a while. Sometimes I would play one track and another would play.
I thought it was my drives, but copying the file didn't help.
So I guess you are right, as these are 20+ year old CDs.
Thanks for the info.

I have hundreds of CDs purchased new from 1986 to 1989 (I know because I made a big list in 1990) and with a rare exception they all play and sound just fine. I don’t know where the data or experiments on this idea that CDs wear out is coming from. Maybe if you leave them in a hot car they will have issues, but otherwise they seem to last just fine.
(The slogan back then: perfect sound forever. Has anyone had many of their old discs fail?)

As for streaming, the problem is far-too-often a track is a non-original strange re-recording because of a copyright issue. Even worse, it’s often not even flagged as being non-original. This is extremely annoying and frustrating if you like popular music from the last several decades.
Tidal, Spotify, Itunes, they all have this problem.

To get these originals onto your own storage, you have to buy a disc and rip it yourself. Until these legal restrictions go away, discs are the only way to go. And I sure don’t want to listen to Youtube or MP3 or other lossy versions with no decent resolution.

And ripping SACDs is basically impossible. And to my ears, SACD is still king, breathtaking and irreplaceable, especially through headphones. [It's a crime the Beatles were never released in SACD, but that's another subject.]