It even defies gravity!

Yesterday, SanDisk announced that they have secured a deal with the four major record labels to release music on MicroSD cards. SanDisk says that these cards will also include album art and liner notes, and will, in an attempt to appease would-be pirates, be encoded at 320 kbps (which is almost three times better than iTunes files) and, more importantly, lack DRM copy protection. These cards will be able to be used by any device with a slot for MicroSD cards, including cell phones and computers, and SanDisk will also offer a USB dongle for users who don’t have a device with a card slot. Best Buy and Wal-Mart have agreed to start selling the cards when they go on sale later this fall.

Most publications seem to be bafflingly positive about this announcement, and I’m scratching my head to figure out why. In short, I see a few major reasons why SlotMusic is doomed to fail.

First, no official price has been released, but the New York Times spoke to a record label executive who speculated that the cards would be offered for between $7 and $10 – roughly the same price as CDs. It sounds good in theory, but look a bit closer. Many people listening to music now have an iPod or another digital music player. These devices often have storage space surpassing 10 GB, allowing them to hold thousands of songs. If you take that pricing model and try to fill up an MP3 player with purchased music, you quickly realize it’s going to take tens of thousands of dollars. When Apple continues to release iPods that double in storage size every time, essentially daring people to fill them with as much music as they can, this pricing model begins to look antiquated and broken. In order for people to jump on board the labels need to offer a system where people pay a set rate per month to download as much as they want. Paying $10 per album is not as fair as it used to be, especially when there are a number of alternatives.

Further, one of the biggest things that the death of music as a physical media has done has been to reduce clutter. People still like having CD and vinyl collections, but just as many people have 10,000+ song libraries in their iTunes and own very few CDs. If they had all the CDs to go with those songs, they’d have a crapload of useless jewel cases lying around their apartment or house. Some may lament not physically owning music, but people are more and more likely to have their music library in an external hard drive than on multiple CD racks in their living room. It’s hard for me to see people like this suddenly going out and buying MicroSD cards, especially considering how damned small they are and likely easy to lose. 

Beyond that, there are quite a few people out there who like downloading things on iTunes just fine. It’s simple: you click something in iTunes, it downloads, shows up in your iTunes folder, and pops onto your iPod when you plug it in. For a lot of people, downloading something outside of iTunes and then having to get it into the proper folder is too difficult. Now they’re supposed to plug in an SD card, locate the files and do it that way? And, if they don’t have an SD slot, they need to buy a USB dongle, much less figure out what the fuck a “dongle” is? Look, that’s not difficult for me or many other people, but for some that is more of a hassle. Why would they leave the comfort of iTunes for something less immediately intuitive? The fact that the Times article seems to suggest that iTunes is too complicated and that this is easier just kind of blows my mind.

Now, I concede that this would have been a good idea if it were proposed five years ago. Technology wasn’t what it is today, but something like this would make a lot more sense if downloading hadn’t already gone nuclear with BitTorrent. A system like this would have made sense as an immediate transition from the CD right when file sharing started to take off. Instead, file sharing exploded to the point where 9 million people are downloading files at any given time…and now people are being asked to take a step back into physical media? Uh…no.

The final point is the most important. Namely, SlotMusic is not going to convince people to stop illegally downloading music. For one thing, most people who download music illegally have no interest in paying. They’re not going to suddenly turn around and buy SlotMusic. The only people this is really going to appeal to are the people who are still buying music. And, like I previously noted, it’s hard to envision them leaving the comfort of iTunes in droves to go try these things out. More importantly, though, is something that The Lefsetz Letter absolutely nailed:

For those so ignorant, for those at the labels getting their music for free…  The only people who care about DRM/copyright protection ARE THOSE WHO ARE STEALING THEIR MUSIC!  People who pay at the iTunes Store don’t give a shit.  Which is why the DRM-free tracks at Amazon and eventually MySpace Music are not taking over the market.  You hear a lot of noise from the Net prognosticators, but those savvy enough to bitch online are also savvy enough to use BitTorrent.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The group that SlotMusic seems that it would most appeal to is the group that will ironically have zero interest in it. The casual music listener likely can’t tell the difference between 128 kbps and 320. I can’t imagine many of them are trying to share their purchases with others, or they just accept DRM as the word of law, so why would they give a shit about that? Hell, how many casual iTunes users are even aware of what DRM is?

Conversely, there is one way SlotMusic could prove appealing: if it offers more than a simple album on an SD card. Think about this: what if you bought an SD card for $7 to $10 and could get the entire Beatles discography? Or a collection of the top 80s alternative albums? It’s at least a moderately intriguing idea. It still wouldn’t really appeal to a file sharer, but it would represent a modicum of progress in the business model.

Of course, just when I think progress like that is possible, I notice this in the Times article:

SanDisk is working on adding other enhancements, like songs that can be played a few times but then must be paid for to be unlocked. 

There’s only one thing I have to say about that.

This is just the latest last-ditch attempt by the record labels to avoid sinking into bankruptcy. Unfortunately, they have yet to realize that the only way to survive would involve radically changing their business model, perhaps to a subscription service modeled after something that already worked pretty damned well.

As it stands, by hoping SlotMusic will convince people not to file share, the record companies have essentially brought a tricycle to the Indy 500.

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