I think that the new players format, changed not just the "where" people are listening to music, but also "how".
I can tell about myself that since I had my new Creative player, i'm using it's "Album of the day" feature almost always (random album from the whole collection) which allowing me to listen to albums that I would never had chosen to listen by myself.
Also, the fact that you can carry a lot of music with you anywhere, disables the limitation of having just a few CD's that you have to listen to over and over again. That creates a situation, where after you bought a CD you're listening to it much less than you used to. therefore you buy more CD's. I will even go far and say that it will change the way artists are making music. I think it's something that happening all along the past few decades: people are listening to their CD's for shorter amount of times, and you can see that a CD that was very trendy last year, won't sound good at all today (most of the pop music, i'm not talking about all of the artists of course, but you can see where i'm going). while in the past, a CD lasts for a long long time, I remember as a child, some "Ace of Base" hit was playing in the radio for a whole year, today you have ten hits like that in one week.
I think the whole music consumption concept is also about to change, and the big entertainment companies are now struggling to find the next winning method for marketing their music.