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Record companies
are scrambling to find new ways to distribute
music in the face of declining music sales. The
latest is slotMusic, a microSD card containing
music in MP3 format without DRM (digital rights
management), playable on pocket devices such as
mobile phones.
EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner
Music have joined forces with memory card maker
SanDisk, which is developing the technology
behind slotMusic.
The cards will
hold 1G byte of data and will ship with a USB
(Universal Serial Bus) adapter so that users can
add their own content using a PC.
SlotMusic cards will first be available at
brick-and-mortar and online stores throughout
the U.S., including Best Buy and Wal-Mart. A
launch in Europe is also to follow. A complete
list of slotMusic albums, availability and
pricing will be announced in time for the coming
holiday season, the companies said. So far,
there are no details of the artists whose music
will be available on the cards: The
slotMusic Web site
simply says that "the year's biggest releases"
will be available in the new format.
To persuade listeners to buy a physical medium
rather than download the songs, the record
companies will offer extras including liner
notes, album art, videos, and "other creative
content that an artist may choose". Music tracks
will also be played back at up to 320K bps.
Using microSD cards to store music sounds rather
cumbersome to Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at CCS
Insight. Built-in storage is still a scarce
resource on most mobile phones, so users are
dependent on memory cards for storing all kinds
of data.
With a slotMusic card one would first have to
take out the main memory card, put in the album,
listen to it or move songs to the built-in
storage (if available), take out the slotMusic
card and then put back the main one. The fact
that card slots are hard to get at on many
phones doesn't help either, according to
Pescatore: Reaching them on some models involves
taking out the battery.
Pescatore also questions whether consumers will
be able to find slotMusic in stores, and thinks
that download services like Nokia's Comes With
Music and Orange Music Max will be more viable
alternatives.
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