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Yet Another Digital Music Format

By Lisha Arino - Sep 23rd, 2008 at 1:21 pm

Ars Technica reports on the music industry’s latest venture. SanDisk (the guys who the make the SD memory cards for your digital camera) and the four major record labels (Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner) have teamed up to create a new physical format called slotMusic which Ars describes as “a tiny, flash-based microSD card with a full album’s worth of MP3s slapped onto it, which will then be sold through a number of brick-and-mortar and online stores.”

While artists and albums have yet to be released, the mp3s are DRM-free, high quality, and users can transfer their own data (pictures, documents, other music, etc.) onto the 1GB cards.

The format is destined to fail. slotMusic isn’t a bad idea, but the developers definitely overlooked the fact that most portable music players don’t have micro SD slots and, as Ars notes, there aren’t many users who own devices that do.

Furthermore, consumption patterns have changed:

In a world where we can easily purchase all the music we could ever want online without ever having to set foot inside of a Wal-Mart—and increasingly, purchase it wirelessly right from our mobile devices—exactly which segment of the market SanDisk is going after remains a mystery. Digital music is all about convenience, and requiring someone to walk into a store or wait for something to be shipped in an unfamiliar format is not convenient. There’s a reason why CD sales are tanking—and it’s not because they’re too big to pop right into your BlackBerry.

Tags: music, tech