Has The Recording Industry Finally Realized That Selling 1,000 Songs In One Package Makes Sense?

from the could-it-be?!? dept

While we still think SanDisk's new music format is unlikely to get much traction, there was one bit of interesting news in a report on the new slotRadio device designed to play its music-on-microSD: you'll be able to buy slotRadio cards with 1,000 songs on them for $40. We've been wondering for years why the industry is so focused on the $1/song price, when new technology allows for tens of thousands of songs to fit in your pocket. In fact, if you get past the whole price-per-song thing, you start to wonder why you can't buy an iPod stuffed with thousands of songs based on exactly what you like. To date, it's always been a price issue -- with the industry requiring its huge fee per song.

But apparently that's changing. slotRadio has almost no chance (DRM included!), but the very fact that it got the industry to agree to a package that involves 1,000 songs for $40 shows that, somewhere, somehow, people in the industry are realizing that, when you can carry 40,000 songs in your pocket, the $1/song pricing model just doesn't make sense.

Filed Under: $1, music, pricing, songs
Companies: sandisk

SanDisk Makes Music Even Less Convenient

from the this-is-progress? dept

SanDisk is getting a bunch of press for releasing what it's positioning as a new "format" for music. But it's not a new format at all. SanDisk is simply sticking mp3s onto a microSD card, reasoning that lots of folks now carry phones with microSD slots in them. That's true (I've got one of those phones), but that hardly makes this a compelling offering. First of all, microSD cards are tiny. They're not the sort of thing that people want to pop in and out of their phones like a CD or a floppy disk. If you do that, you'll probably end up losing the microSD. So, most folks I know simply put a single microSD card in their phones and just use it as expanded storage. Besides, these days, most folks know that removable storage is annoyingly inconvenient compared to just using a blank disc and moving around the music you already have. I don't want to have to remember to put a specific microSD card into my phone if I want to hear a band -- especially when it's ridiculously easy for me to just transfer music from my computer to my phone instead. SanDisk claims that this will work because people don't know how to download music -- but they might be surprised if they actually went and spoke to people, rather than making up stuff in an effort to sell more microSD cards.

Filed Under: microsd, music, portable
Companies: sandisk

SanDisk Sues Just About Everyone It Can Think Of For Patent Infringement

from the and-using-the-loophole-too dept

Apparently SanDisk feels that it's been wronged. It believes that just about every company that makes USB flash drives, CompactFlash cards, multimedia cards, MP3/media players and/or other removable flash storage products are violating SanDisk patents. These products have been around for quite some time, but SanDisk doesn't name the specific patents in its press release, so it's not clear if these are new patents, or SanDisk's lawyers woke up one morning and suddenly decided it would be fun to sue for patent infringement. And, sue for patent infringement they did. They've targeted 25 companies with patent infringement lawsuits, and (for good measure) are using the infamous ITC loophole to ban importing any of these company's products into the US (which could happen even if the patent lawsuits get thrown out). It's certainly tough to judge the quality of the patents in play here, but the fact that there are at least 25 companies in the space doing the same thing, and all are getting sued at once, it makes you wonder how non-obvious the patents were in the first place...

Filed Under: lawsuits, patents
Companies: sandisk