You had to hold it up to a candle.

Burning cd's for ripped movies/pirated games was mostly obsoleted by super cheap & huge hard drives, in combination with piracy mainly transitioning to downloads over the internet idue to increased bandwidth and removed caps (instead of physical sharing of medi). Price per byte for HDD storage decreased 1000x between 1995-2008. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1995..latest

Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.

Funny anecdote; my friend's mother referred to the cd burner as "the cd crusher" in the late 90's, I guess it's easy to mix up the terms if one is oblivious to the fact that the information is burned into the disc by a laser.

Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
For a short while, you could get CD players that also played MP3s burned onto a CD-R. You could put a ton of MP3s on one CD-R. I had lots of BBC radio dramas on them. All lost now, sadly. And there doesn't seem to be anyone archiving them anymore despite daily dramas.
- I recently purchased an old Toyota from 2009, which had the TOTL audio system including an MP3 compatible cd player and Bluetooth (voice/phone-only). I ended up using the cd tray as a slot for a phone holder, and use a Bluetooth LDAC dongle connected to the AUX input. But I'm gonna burn an old school MP3 cd and leave it in the glove box for a rainy day :)

Don't forget USB sticks and file storage services like DropBox.

CD burning was mostly dead by the mid-to-late naughties. Streaming came later.

Not really, I still had plenty of people who used CDs up until 2010 at least.
- There’s going to be some variance depending on how a person tends to listen to their music. I think the decline of CDs correlates pretty well with digital options being available, and people making the switch. There’s always going to be people at the head of the pack using the new thing and people that want to save costs by keeping what they’ve got. The accessory market affects that too, there was overlap when people would have portable digital music players, but still use optical disks for their home stereo and vehicles. But as manufacturers came out with solutions like iPod docks or Bluetooth streaming the digital devices were able to push out the physical media.
USB flash drives took way longer to catch on than most people remember, thanks to how ubiquitous they are now. It took ages for them to become large enough to be worth a damn, for the plurality of computers to be compatible enough to support them, and for them to become affordable enough for anyone other than nerds or businessmen with an expense account to care. And then USB 2.0 just would not gain widespread adoption for what felt like about a century, so even what was available was inevitably agonizingly slow even if it had any kind of capacity.
There was a solid chunk of time between about 1997 and 2006 when a CD-R was not only monumentally cheaper than flash media but was also much more likely to work in any random computer or other device you stuck it into. Prior to about 2003 you couldn't realistically even buy a flash drive that held as much data as a humble CD-R in the first place. In 2004 a 256 megabyte USB flash drive would run you $50 and operate at piddling USB 1.1 speed, but a 700 megabyte CD-R was 20 cents. That helped the CD-R and certainly the DVD+/-R formats to hang on well past their supposed sell-by date.
(And I just checked, since I was morbidly curious. A Verbatim CD-R still costs about 21 cents per disc at Microcenter. Yes, you can still buy them.)
A later large portion of the application for writable CD's was, I'm sure you'll remember, good old fashioned wholesome piracy. At 20 cents each it was cheap and easy to run off a copied CD full of whatever to give to your friends and not expect to get it back. So even after flash drives became affordable, they were never never affordable enough for most people to do that.

The time between CD burners being uncommon nerd shit, and the iPod becoming ubiquitous, was a single digit number of years. I had a fairly early CD mp3 player (it could play red book audio discs and data discs with mp3s on them) plus I had a CD player in my truck, so I actually did burn a few discs in my day, but a lot of people went straight from buying albums on disc or tape to dragging and dropping files onto a hard drive or flash based mp3 player.

I had a fancy CD/DVD burner in my first laptop circa 2015 and used it very very sparingly. It also had a fancy feature where you could buy special disks that the burner could burn a cover imagine onto. It was crap.

The IPod killed CDs i think is pretty established

There were other attempts, like the Diamond Rio

But because of iTunes, the ipod made actually getting songs onto your device as easy as clicking a button and apple got into bed with the recording industry so they didnt get shut down hard like everyone else that came before them and you didnt have to be labelled a dirty pirate.

mp3s were quite disruptive and contentious ahh Napster

Mp3 players killed cds, the ipod came later and killed mp3 players.
- What mp3 player had any success compared to the ipod?!
  In 1998, the first portable solid-state digital audio player MPMan, developed by SaeHan Information Systems, which is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, was released and the Rio PMP300 was sold afterward in 1998, despite legal suppression efforts by the RIAA.
  There really werent any clear mp3 players standouts available to the public because of letigious RIAA
  But there were many portable cd players that could play mp3 discs when the ipod came out.
  Sonys minidisc player was cool, but an absolute flop from success standpoint, we wanted reusable media, burning cds was often a frustrating process.
  Ill say it again the RIAA was absolutely (litigiously) against any device they couldnt get their fingers into and apple was happy to work out a deal with them with itunes. The next best thing was napster from a user standpoint(though scourexchange was better imo but lasted about a minute)
  Cds were the main way artists released music because rhe RIAA didnt support mp3 anywhere they didnt have to, it took years for people to really switch over to itunes, but they did and streaming took over from there eventually
  Not sure why im getting downvotes, but please correct anything you disagree with
  
  What mp3 player had any success compared to the ipod?!
  A whole 128MB of storage.
  
  Man I've seen Dankpods hit so many of those with a brick.
  
  old mate 1 grit
  
  First of all, love the username.
  Second, what was that one, and do you happen to know when it was released?
  
  Those were created by the legions, mostly cheap Chinese versions whose chips would fail in summer (source: I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina where we have had 40ºC / 104ºF summers and I had many of those sputtering and dying on me).
  
  It wasn't 1 company that dominated ,many had mp3 players out. Some of the bigger name brand ones would have been the likes of Sony (after they gave up on the mini disk) and Creative, but there were many others in the early 2000's.
  
  I fully accept that there were others, but they were not superfluous(not sure if that is the correct word to use but it feels right)
  I guess maybe the point was trying to make is that for portable music the cd player was hands down still the best thing until the ipod took over.
  Much like the (and credit to Sony here) walkman before it, the discman is still the device that people used for digital music, specifically mp3s, until the ipod came out.
  So yeah im saying it took 1 company, apple in this case, to kill the cd. Not because other people werent in the fight, but because of itunes and apples ease of use development