At least in America it didn't really though. I was in my twenties in the 1990s and would have been in the target audience but nobody I knew had an MD player and you'd only rarely even see the players in stores. I know they were big in Japan but in the US people either still used their 1980's cassette players (Walkman and the like) or, if they cared about portable sound quality, a portable CD player like a Discman. I still think the MD format is cool because it seems so cyberpunkish, though.
It's a really good example of how history is written by Americans. MiniDisc was a huge hit nearly everywhere except the USA, but it is now remembered as a "failure" because it didn't catch on there.
There was a window of a few years in the UK, Europe, and Asia where you could not get on a bus or train without seeing someone listening to MiniDisc.
