New Formats for Music Emerge
The recording industry has always been driven by new formats throughout its history. From wax cylinders to vinyl records, from cassette and 8-track tape to CD and more recently MP3 files. The music industry has always moved forward by introducing successful new formats and migrating people to a better product. The CD has been around for nearly 23 years and is a tired format. The major labels refused to license unprotected MP3 files and this decision is one of the reasons that they are in trouble today.
The future of music lies in embracing and developing new formats that give people increasing value and convenience – and makes music more attractive and makes it sound better.
In our book, ‘The Future of Music’, and in recent industry presentations we proposed new formats for music, such as those to be delivered on flash memory cards and in jewelry.
Now, the vision begins to come to life.
SanDisk has announced plans to deliver music content via its microSD, flash based memory cards. The company will offer the new Rolling Stones album, ‘A Bigger Bang’, on the format starting in November. The price point will be $39.95, and the cards will be available through a large number of retailers. The Rolling Stones deal is only the beginning with the cards eventually including other forms of media. The company also announced that its Gruvi cards will be compatible with the Yahoo Music Unlimited service, allowing consumers to listen to subscription-based content across the same range of devices. To achieve this, the Gruvi cards will be compatible with the Yahoo Music Engine software client, which lets listeners manage music, create playlists, and purchase downloads.
Providing as both FLAC and MP3 is laudable, but FLAC is beyond the ken of most users. Why don’t they just put WAV/AIFF files on the card? If it’s 1GB, there’s plenty of room for a single album in that format.
While the idea is interesting, how many albums would you buy for $40? Presumably, the incentive is that you need a SD card; but you don’t need dozens of them.
Yet another good idea gone wrong…