Only the most fanatical audiophiles will tell you there's an appreciable difference between a reasonable compressed file and a CD playback (then again, the quality of the playback hardware makes a difference too). And with bandwidth and local storage space getting cheaper by the second, high (very lossy) compression rates are no longer necessary.

I don't see why the notion of publishing a related group of songs together (related even by nothing more than some compiler's whim) should go away. The "album" after all has been around over 50 years (I'd be glad to think of that as "very recent" but it isn't, really, in recorded-music terms) - it started life as a collection of discs published together in a "book" (like a photo album, hence the term I reckon), related by artist/editor/A&R whim, or some external relationship like source (South Pacific, or Oklahoma or some other show or movie etc.) No doubt our notions of relationship among artefacts of intellectual property will evolve (as they've been doing all along) but I don't think we're in danger of "losing" anything.