Buzz Out Loud Lounge forum: SlotMusic: the universe delivers

DataPlay tried to replace CDs in 2001 with an optical disk the size of a half-dollar:

http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/P0000652.jpg

DataPlay won all the big tech awards. Most major labels and MP3 player manufacturers signed on. Then, Apple introduced the iPod. The market dried up for removable media players, including portable CD players. The DataPlay company scaled back its new media to shift focus to DVDs, although they seem to still sell DataPlay media and drives by e-mail.

SlotMusic does have some notable advantages over DataPlay. Solid-state SlotMusic is much more speedy, rugged, and power-efficient than optical disks like DataPlay. At 1GB, SlotMusic cards can hold more CD-quality music than real 600-720MB CDs, but the 500MB DataPlay discs occasionally required some compression. Who cares? Physical media is on the way out; DataPlay understood that and cut its losses.

The only way SlotMusic makes sense is as a strategy to undercut the used CD market. The RIAA gets no income from sales of used CDs. Of course, every penny the RIAA doesn't collect is an act of piracy. With a reusable MicroSD card, you can rip your new tracks to your computer for syncing elsewhere, then erase and reuse the card as digital film, reducing the incentive to resell. "Reuse" is one of the three holy Rs of the green movement, so CDs will become the new styro.

Or, maybe RIAA execs just don't remember DataPlay like they don't remember the 70s. Yeah, that's probably more likely.

Physical Media will be out when digital can actually replace it.

Last week were were flipping some books on Amazon. My wife asked "should I sell this book I have it on my computer" I said "can you put it on another computer?" She tried. It didn't work. Her book is as reliable as a laptop and won't survive a reformat.

We kept the physical book. I can put it on any book shelf and it will 'just work'. Digital media can be like that, but isn't.

The big old school music labels are finally getting the reality of DRM and the new consumer web based method of sales ,( iTunes , MySpace etc ) are increase their market share at the cost to the more traditional types of media storage. Physical media will continue to disappear with the big dinosaurs companies trying more and more desperate measures to get us consumers back. Its not going to work the CD will go the
Way of the Lp and the cassette , devices like the Zune and the Kindle offer streaming of media content that will end up winning ,(once DRM is finally resigned to the bad idea bin), still it I got a laugh that Metalica was willing to try it, just desserts from my perspective for them to be associated with this crap.

Fair enough, I get the pros of a physical media for music re a persons car but the world is changing, my cousin is a 42 year old timber truck driver, ( in Australia) when he started out , his father swore blind by something 8 Track and had, (still has)An amazing collection, my cousin put his money on some flash in the pan new
technology called CDs , his dad laughed and said itll never take off.
my cousins teenage daughter has now converted him to MP3 downloads, I guess the point I was making was the evolution in music is driven by the end users nowadays where in the past the large cooperates ran it to their whims ( and profit margins ), the MP3 CD is still relevant for now , ( I burn them for my cousin ) but he then loads them on to an iPod for playing on long trips but its the iPod thats the physical media ( or any player) thats the container for a good may now days, I agree with you though no one I know has a problem with the sound quality of MP3 CDs.