Respect Authority

Regardless of the fact that music today, for the most part, just isn’t very good, the four major music labels and SanDisk are teaming up to release albums on a special version of SanDisk’s CompactFlash memory cards, commonly used in digital cameras.

Photo Credit: AP

Another ill-fated move at driving profit into a dying industry, the SanDisk slotMusic mini flash memory cards can be read by some cell phones and PDAs, MP3 players, car stereos and your computer with a USB adapter. Not that anyone will buy them except for a curious few, especially considering to start they’re only releasing 29 albums on the format — a pretty pathetic number to try to represent the vast amount of popular music available across a wide range of genres. Nonetheless, Usher, Weezer, Elvis, and the veritable legend Akon (jokes!) are some of the artists that will be accounted for in the initial launch, which is due before the holiday season.

Personally, I think it’s going to be a hideous failure, invoking nightmare flashbacks of the long deceased Mini Disc, and here’s why.

While these slotMusic cards will be shelved next to CDs in retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, they also offer the opportunity to be placed in check out lines and the like, places CDs can’t fit. So you get a couple impulse buyers here and there on Christmas Eve when they see that “Hey there, Kenny G’s out on slotMusic!” Regardless, the music industry’s sales were nearly cut in half from 2001 to 2007. According to the RIAA, CD sales dropped from 942 million CDs, worth $13.2 billion, in 2000 to 511 million in 2007, worth $7.4 billion. However, iTunes has sold over 5 billion songs since 2003, which shows there’s clearly still a market for music — it’s just that people’s perceptions of what music should cost and what its most convenient format is have changed. Even still, 5 billion songs sold on iTunes can’t make up for the huge losses in CD sales every year since 2000.

It’s a shrinking industry, and simply introducing a new format isn’t going to spark sales when that format is a go-between to get to the preferred format, which is digital. Likewise, CDs are a go-between. The majority of people who are buying music today are listening to it either on their computer or on an MP3 player, a market which is dominated by the iPod. So, even if someone were to buy a slotMusic card, they would more than likely not play it in a cellphone that can read them, opting instead to load it onto their computer and add it to their iTunes library. Why not just download it and save yourself the trip to the store? Not to mention the price point: slotMusic cards will reportedly cost about the price of your average CD, which makes the format difference absolutely negligible considering computers can read both.

If you’re going to buy your music on a physical format, it may come down to either slotMusic or CDs, but it’s not going to create more sales, it will just reallocate some to a different format. Not that it matters, the CD will reign “supreme,” if you can even call it that considering their own crumbling popularity. It’s like a slap-fight between a couple of losers.

[CNN's SciTechBlog] [Business Week]