The Money In Music Downloading Is Still In Hardware
from the can-you-say-loss-leader?--I-knew-that-you-could... dept
As just about every company finalizes their plans to set up their own imitation music download store, a new study is suggesting (as has been said before), that the real money in downloadable music is for consumer electronics firms selling more hardware to play back the music. The study also found that an awful lot of people really aren't interested in paying for downloadable music. Of course, I'm still waiting for someone to go ahead and offer a complete musical package. That would be a music player that comes complete with a ton of music already installed - perhaps covering a certain (prolific) artist, or an entire genre. It could also come with some sort of service that would let users download new songs in that category as they come out. Of course, as it stands right now, the recording industry would force the price to be so high on any such offering that it could never be done.
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I'm still listening for some one to propose a method that I think is ameanable to everyone (and I do mean I THINK, which may be different from what you and others think).
Other than being severely disjointed, today's services, itunes, Musicmatch, real, etc seem to be a reasonable start on the problem. Not that there aren't lots of problems, the most basic being the difference in media formats, but a good start.
While I hear people complain that 99 cent is too much for a song, I find it a nice compromise. I had to pay 13 bucks for a CD which had 2 or 3 worthwhile cuts. Now I pay two to three bucks for the music I actually Want. Seems like a good deal to me; the consumer. And the artist who's getting boned, at least initially.
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I think that you could make the container of the music you purchase be the container of the music. You'd base this on a physical shell (with Author/title label), maybe its own AAA battery holder, proprietary chip-set for the compression / labelling scheme, basic set of controls for play / fast forward / volume / equalizer / etc.
The music itself would be in a EPROM chip in the container. EPROM chips can be cheaper than flash RAM chips to manufacture.
I'd also like to see the sale of smart Flash memory chips that could be sold based on their self-determined chip quality. This would mean that a chip designed to be 128Mb that for quality reasons can only do 120Mb would self-seal the bad memory locations and sell itself at a cheaper rating ( 120/128th the cost? )
Eventually, the users of the memory chips would see the amount of memory as a fluid thing, after all, who really uses the full capabilities of any memory storage medium , anyhow?
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