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Portable MP3 Hardware Sales Up
prostoalex writes "In December of 2002 only 12% of US music downloaders owned a digital music player, while for this year the number has increased to 17%. Jupiter Research expects the sales of the digital music players to double this year, while another research agency notes a remarkable shift towards paying for music. Even the music industry tends to agree that online music stores are a boon and expects the Web sales to really take off in 2004." (And the sales of Ogg-capable hardware are up, too, since there finally is some.)
Do CD players that can play MP3-CD's count too?
-- taking over the world, we are.
is that >4/5 of music downloaders still only listen to that music on their computers - ? When MP3 playing portable cd players (whew, that's long), for example, hardly cost more than one's that don't..
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
I just bought one of these. (page in swedish sorry) Very nifty, you hang it around your neck, it only weighs 15 grams. Great when you want to go running and 256 MB is more than enough for a jogging run.
If these number go up after the Pepsi million song giveaway with Itunes. Supposedley it will be on during the superbowl, so that would be a big target audience.
I'm sure the RIAA is quaking in their boots hearing this. I keep waiting for them to start to go after MP3 manufacturers because we all know if you use an MP3 player you steal music.
Which had me really interested in the interview with Steve Jobs previously referenced here on slashdot was that music execs thought that 'ripping a CD' equated to theft, not to converting it to MP3s.
To be that out of touch with consumers of your product just helps me feel that market pressures, not lawsuits or 'civil disobediance' of supporting Kazaa and other illegal methods of distribution will slowly convert the morons.
That or we could all hope they die of old age because to not understand what Ripping is they have to be 100+ and never used a computer in their life. Hell my Grandpa new what the internet was and he was 91 when he joked about me finding him a girlfriend online after I met my wife that way. He drove road graters for a living, and never touched a computer.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I'm assuming you mean downloadable videos that you can burn yourself. This will probably happen when your average person's bandwidth gets high enough that downloading an entire movie is no more of a hassle than downloading a CD worth of music is now. Why? Because at that point the online trading of videos will truly begin and the MPAA will have to start looking at a different business model, just as the RIAA is now. Personally, I think the whole of the RIAA are idiots because they really missed an incredible opportunity to drastically reduce their distribution costs. They seem to be just now coming to their senses, but because they waited so long they have to deal with lots of "middle men" and competition.
Just wait and see. When you can download 2GB of data in about 2 hours, you'll start seeing the market open up. And before anybody jumps all over me, yes, I'm aware that there are already "stores" where you can watch streaming video or download and watch, but I don't think these are the same quality as what you would get on a DVD. Somebody correct me (and provide info) if I'm wrong.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Personally even with my 1.5MB/s DSL I do not consider that a feature I'm looking for.
Number of reasons
A) The size of the file to get the quality of Video/Audio that I want. Basically I need a DVD worth of quality at a minimum, which is 5 - 10 GBs of space. I like the extras, trailers, etc. So to get this, I'd need to 'want to watch a movie' maybe a day after I decide to get the movie.
B) I'm a collector of sorts. I've got about 700 DVDs that I've impulse bought since 1996 or so. Granted I've only purchased about 700 CDs and a few hundred songs via iTunes. With that many DVDs and the associated data on them, if I wanted to have them for 'instant gratification' I'd need roughly 4.2TBs of storage. That doesn't account for even more stuff coming out over the next x number of years.
Granted newer encoding tech such as MPEG-4 vs. MPEG-2 might help with the storage requirements, but then I'd need to have the movie companies re-encode things like 'Better off Dead' or '*Batteries not included' which about 20 people probably would want, and then I'd need to re-spend money to get them that way.
DVDs have introduced a new phenomenon to the movie industry. People willing to buy them.
I bought 9 video tapes. The first six star trek movies & the original Star Wars trilogy (not that re-done versoin, the THX version)
Just my $0.02.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Works great! Contrary to a review linked on the last /. OGG/MP3 player article, the Java client works perfectly. I was able to use it to transfer and delete songs over ethernet from both my Linux desktop and my Powerbook laptop.
The Win32 software and a USB2 connection seem to be required for firmware updates, but it works fine with factory firmware.
It's not as elegant as the iPod in the layout of controls and the Interface, but no showstoppers. The addition of ethernet (only via a cradle) and a java client for mac/linux sealed the deal. I recommend it.
I went in to Best Buy/Circuit City yesterday on my lunch hour, looking for a MP3 player to use in the car.
They were out of almost every model. The only ones they had were the mega-expensive models, and the cheap junk low-end models. All the mid-range stuff was gone.
I figured they were selling a ton of them.
Even my dad said he wanted one for Christmas. I told him he didn't have a computer. "But you can put songs on it for me."
Now that I think about it, it's probably eaiser than being 24/7 tech support for him if he got a PC.
There's not one new music selling place that hasn't at least broke even at $0.99 a track? ow long before we see that special "mini Album" by (insert pop star here) for 4.99 for *6* songs?
Of course, Jack Valenti will still be moaning, but the rest of the industry will be looking at him the same way they look at him when he talks about VCR's and rentals... I.e. "what were we thinking?" after having made more money per song by not having to pay hardly anything to distribute it.
-Chris
No thanks. FM does really horrible things to audio quality. If you can't hear it, that's fine, but I can -- even on stock speakers. The most audible area is low bass -- FM radio only transmits 50 Hz-15 kHz.
Note that this is broadcast FM, but AFAIK all of the local-area broadcast devices are subject to the same limitations. Most FM stations do more compression on the signal than this, so it should still sound better than they do.
Men, women, children, cats, dogs all shopping, buying, comparing MP3's. Professing the virtues of HD vs Flash vs CD vs personal/use profiles.
Even Pops at the ripe young age of 74 was asking me if he could use one when golfing and how easy was it to "Rip" a CD. (I can't believe he even said that)
Its all good...
I realise that this is a bit off topic, so my apologies.
I've been sampling some ogg music, and I must say the quality is excellent. Mercifully, ogg files do not have the same high-pitched "hiss" that is in most mp3's. People say I'm crazy but I swear I can hear it!
I have lately been compressing my music (CD) collection to ogg format. However, does anyone have a good resource/site that offers ogg encoded music? I have no problem paying a small fee for music, I just don't think iTunes offers ogg. Maybe I'm wrong.
Also if anyone can recommend the best ogg capable portable player (bang for buck). Thanks in advance!
this is my sig, be amazed.
So now we are going to be Bi-MP3 - Large HD (iPod) and Small Flash (Rio etc) kind of a pain in the arse...
When is that 20G flash model going to arrive...
I've had 4 HDD based mp3 players, about 5 flash players, and two PDA's specifically bought to play mp3 and watch videos with. I've also had 2 diff types of minidisc players. All in all, while the PDA's were able to play music (and no, I didn't use the included media player), ultimately they were too much hassle, and something like the Dell Axim costs about as much as the typical HDD based player. Also, even with the extended batt on the Axim, the batt life barely lasts a day while playing non stop at work, with the screen off, and the system in low cpu mode. My minidisc player on the other hand will go several days non stop without any problems. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the minidisc is the way to go -- in fact I hate it reconverting mp3's to atrac3 format, and the other hassles (software mostly), but I am saying that dedicated music players tend to do it well, and in the long run, are a better solution. I lasted 6 months with my last PDA before I gave up and went back to a dedicated solution.
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Anonymous Cowards and their severe lack of wits....
First the "middle men" existed long before there was broadband.... Third do some research. You'll find that distribution costs isn't the biggest cost of producing music, so "broadband for everyone" isn't going to do more than shift costs around....
Never did I state that middle men didn't exist before broadband. The opportunity the RIAA companies had was to eliminate the middleman that was already part of the legacy business model. At present, the retailer markup on a music CD is between 30 and 50 percent (yes, I did my research here). While that's actually a pretty low markup, online distribution would get rid of this cost and actually allow RIAA members to grab some of it for themselves. If you look at the per-song costs for something like iTunes, you can see that your typical "customized" CD exceeds the wholesale price of a CD. (Per-album costs seem to be only slightly above wholesale costs.) In addition, the cost of shipping CDs to warehouses and retailers goes away and is only partly replaced by the cost of maintaining the computing infrastructure necessary to house and sell online content. Furthermore, according to the RIAA, the biggest portion of the cost of a CD is marketing and promotion. While this cost could never go away, it can be somewhat reduced by providing online content and per-song pricing. If a customer can download a single tune for only 99 cents, they are far more likely to take a risk on new artists. After all, 99 cents isn't much to lose to determine that Boy Band X is just as bad as all the others. Finally, there is currently some experimentation going on by independent artists to reduce production costs by using more commoditized recording equipment and directly targeting the online format. If the recording, mixing and editing processes are all done digitally on a computer, the total cost of production goes down.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
If I really wanted, I could carry roughly 100 CDs in my Lyra. It plays wav audio no problems. Hell of a lot nicer than carrying around 100 CDs every time I hit the road (never mind the fact that I'm on public transit :).
However, the number of times I've had on high end headphones and been sitting in a perfectly quiet room listening to mp3s.. well, I can't even count it. Background noise does far more to interfere with audio quality, and mp3 players are generally used outside of sound-proofed rooms, with a $10 pair of headphones.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
What I'm looking for in MP3 playing is an in-dash unit (DIN5) that can read DVD-R filesystems and play the mp3s from there, basically giving days worth of music on a disc. For portable players, theres the Sony MPD-AP20U to do this, but what is a car player than can do this? I haven't been able to find one.
-no broken link
Most portable mp3 players also support wav as well as mp3. The Rio Karma supports FLAC, which is a lossless audio compressiona codec.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
A well-encoded divX file can be very high quality. Better picture than VHS, and while not quite the quality of a DVD it's still darn good.
Most of the DivX stuff you see are theatre rips, or cheap/fast jobs done. They have artifacts, file errors, audio issues, etc.
I have a DVD-Rip of "Orgazmo" (please, not jokes) which is of superb quality. Downloading it from Kazaa saved me the time of either ripping/re-encoding my own DVD, but with the price of drives being cheap I could probably have left my machine on whilst I was at work to get the job done as well.
The nicest part of having the rip? My laptop - which doesn't play DVD's can run them, as can most friends' PC's... and I don't have to worry about my original being scratched when I drag it over to a party involving alcohol and amusing movies.