As the cost of memory and other storage media relentlessly goes down, I think the need for compression (in terms of file sizes and songs fitting on a device) will go away. The uglier form of compression which enables incompetent sound engineers to cram a "louder" average signal on a given medium is a thornier problem that (sadly) seems to be getting worse and (even more sadly) that many younger folks don't even seem to care about.

My personal solution is to use FLAC for the home where I can slightly compress file sizes without any signal loss, allowing me to serve content off of a reasonably cheap hard drive. For "mobile" (car/gym/ipod/etc), I stick with 320kbit MP3 compression which is a decent balance of file size and fidelity.

Best,