I actually bought an album off Bandcamp on MiniDisc maybe five years ago. I'd assumed it was just new-old-stock media but maybe not?

A MiniDisc community member based in Japan contacted Sony just a few months ago and confirmed that they were still producing one model of blanks (the MDW80T, which is (was?) still sold at retail in Japan and are the blanks used for most Bandcamp MDs (which themselves are usually prepared by a company called BandCDs in the UK)

Happy to discuss MD more if people have questions!

You may be able to look at it and tell.

Mass-produced MDs were stamped (or molded) just like CDs were. There was nothing new here but stuff like the codec and the packaging -- the media itself had more in common with a CD than it had differences. They were strictly read-only.

Meanwhile, recordable MDs were a whole different magneto-optical thing, full of neat tricks.

AFAIK, there haven't been any mass-produced MD albums for a rather long time.

But there have been some recent albums made on recordable MDs -- slowly, one at a time -- whether new, NOS or recycled or whatever.