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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.
Funny how the music industry changes its tune as soon as the money starts rolling in.
...while the RIAA locks and loads the lawsuit cannon for yet another salvo.
"Oh yeah, the Internet, it's the latest thing!"
I wonder if customers will be as easily confused?
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So let me get this straight:
In 2002 only 12% of people downloading music owned MP3 players
In 2003 17% of people downloading music owned MP3 players.
So we're talking percents of percents here. 12% of however many people were downloading music (on that'd be less if we're talking people who've paid for their downloaded music). Has this number increased, decreased?
Thankfully in the new 2003 Jupiter Research consumer survey, 6 percent of online adults said they would be buying a portable music device in the next 12 months. What's an online adult, am I an online adult?
Uhuh? Anyone else confused? They seem like numbers just for the sake of numbers to me...
It shreds the iPod in every way. Plays WMA and OGG like the iPod doesn't. 20GB drive, records standard like the iPod doesn't, has built in radio as the iPod doesn't, mic input (yes it records standard) true SRS surround sound, USB2.0 like the iPod doesn't, digital and analog audio out, the sexiest case on a portable music player ever, and all for $370.
go to http://www.outwardsound.com/products.php/7/278/ for a look.
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.
The music industry corporations made a bundle by changing the format of the media that they supply. There were millions made when the CD replaced the LP and millions of older releases were sold to people who already had the album.
The shift to a portable digital format has been made outside of their control and now they are struggling to catch up.
The lack of willingness by the younger population (12-17) in this study to purchase music points to the fact that they may have already missed the boat.
Where have you been? Then money's been rolling in.
There was that 12 year-old girl they sued and got some money out of, that 70-something year old man they sued, the college kids they sued, the housewife they're suing, etc., etc.
Damn Moronic Editors
they could, of course (hopefully before someone else says it!) be making (ordinary red-book audio) CDs from those downloads... no portably mp3 player required, hehe. :)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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?
" It shreds the iPod in every way. Plays WMA and OGG like the iPod doesn't. 20GB drive, records standard like the iPod doesn't, has built in radio as the iPod doesn't, mic input (yes it records standard) true SRS surround sound, USB2.0 like the iPod doesn't, digital and analog audio out, the sexiest case on a portable music player ever, and all for $370."
Unfortunately it doesn't come with a Job's Reality Distortion Field (JRDF), so it's not as good.
You mean "Vorbis", not "Ogg". As has been pointed out many times, Ogg is the "container", and Vorbis is the audio codec.
</pedant>
Ydco co
right now seems like a good chance for me to say thank you to all who provided useful comments and tips in the article posted earlier this week on the lack of discounts available for the Apple iPod.
alas, I still have not been able to find a decent deal. Many have pointed to apple's refurb'd items store, but it's out of stock on ipods. the best thing I've got right now is that Target will give you a $15 gift card when you buy an ipod.
my best hope is that some marketer at Apple will see the original post and the responses and perhaps have a change of heart in what seems to be their "no discounting" policy, and how the cheaper prices offered by their competitors might be beating them in the market.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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.
What the music services need to do now is provide a web based interface to their music library. I really hate it that itunes and napster require you to instll their software before seeing if a particular song/artist/album is avail. If I'm only looking for a particular song/artist/album then I don't want to install some random piece of software first. Granted most people are going to pick and use one service as their primary, ie iTunes for me, but I'm not adverse to using others if they carry music I can't get through my primary.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
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.
It is great that MP3 player sales are up, but I don't think that there is necessarily any sort of relationship to online music sales.
Now maybe there *is* a relationship to increased use of P2P services by the public...
Correct me if I'm wrong....
"Ripping" is a pretty specific term, and you have to have performed the task yourself and have some knowledge of what is going on. Most user-friendly software that converts CDs to MP3s do not call it "ripping".
I don't think that most people over the age of 30 would be able to tell you what "ripping" means.
And even a lot of those people that are computer literate are not necessary to the level where they know all of the "lingo".
Free your ecomony and enact the FairTax
www.neurosaudio.com
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
The iPod can record with a Belkin add-on mic. It records right to disk, so you can record hundreds of hours of stuff.
I dunno. I have an older car (1995) that only had a tape-deck/radio. Since I have a large collection of music ripped to MP3 format, I was growing more and more dissappointed that I could not listen to my music in my car. I started investigating replacing the in-dash radio with a CD player that would read MP3's. Still, this was an imperfect option for me, cause I would still have to deal with CDs which are a pain in the butt to keep from getting scratched, out of direct sunlight, away from extremes of hot and cold, etc... I had resigned myself to dealing with this, as it was certainly better than nothing...but having burned mp3 cd's in the past, I realized that 700megs of music (+/-) is but a fraction of my collection and at best, an mp3 cd player was but a fractional step in the right direction.
So, I resigned myself to spending some cash and started researching players. Then I stumbled across this guy, and I got excited. For $229 bucks I could house 20gigs worth of music. It broadcasts audio on the FM dial, so all I had to do was tune my radio station to the Neuros broadcast station and viola, music instantly available. ...it beats the hell
outta ripping apart my dash to play mp3 disks.
What's even better is that at $229 it cost less than most of the in dash mp3/CD players I was looking at. So, I took the plunge...
Haven't had a complaint yet. Works exactly as advertised. Support folk are excellent, price was great. It's not the sleekest, or sexiest player on the market, but the damn thing is cheap, versatile, and open source. Check it out if you want a solution to playing mp3's in your car. This little thing will let you play 'em anywhere. I'd take one of these over an iPod any day.
http://www.neurosaudio.com
As an alternative, how about getting over your distaste for Apple and just buy the iPod? It really is an amazing device for how simple it is. Plus, if you are in the habit of losing/breaking expensive things, maybe your alternative is some homeowner's/renter's insurance. (Alternatives to the iPod cost several hundred dollars themselves.) Just a thought. PS- A bluetooth player would take *ages* to transfer music to. BT might be cool for controlling the device, but not for sending music to it.
Boom Shanka
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...
Hmmm... Well, to each his own. I hadn't noticed this to be a problem. In my car I want good sound of course, but I think the bigger problems are attributed to the poor listening environment (engine noise, wind noise, driving distractions, etc...). Any limitations in FM transmission just has not been an issue for me in my car. But, I can see how that might be an annoyance for vehicle audiophiles. Good luck!
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 wonder how many people are turned off of personal digital audio players by the compromised sound quality of lossy codecs? The price per megabyte isn't nearly so attractive for those that prefer lossless quality.
When MiniDisc was new (and expensive), manufacturers targeted audiophiles while the advertising emphasized custom mixes and sound quality (even though ATRAC is also lossy). With "MP3 players," the emphasis is usually on quantity, not quality. Being able to accomodate realtime filters like DFX might be a way to find some middle ground.
I realize that most consumers either tolerate or are unaware of the fidelity loss, hence the continued dominance of the now inferior MP3 format. Still, I think that in order for this market to grow more quickly, it should educate consumers about the options available to them with these devices: CD quality if you want it, or OGG (etc.) if you want more tracks per MB.
I'm surprised that with car stereos, we're still just seeing a lot of CD players that read MP3 CDs. I'd quite prefer to keep all my music in one place like an iPod (oh, how I wish I had one). I would actually like to see more car stereos with the audio-in so that I could use an MP3 player in my car too. I wonder why that hasn't caught on. It would sure double my incentive to buy an iPod (as if there weren't incentive enough).
Life today. Uncertainty tomorrow.
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?
The referenced articles says "...the number of paying music downloaders doubled in the first half of 2003 -- coinciding with the [RIAA] announcement that they intended to begin prosecuting file-sharers ..."
How ignorant. The RIAAs litigious behavior has
nothing to do with it. Paying downloaders increased because
sites offering to sell music increased.
--tif
Weekend trips. If you can find me a PocketPC that holds a gig or 3 for under $300 USD, you might convince me.
:)
Now imagine a world where you can't predict to the song just what you're going to want to listen to days in advance.
I find I listen to a LOT more variety in my music collection now, simply because I don't pre-select what I'm going to carry with me that day. Also because I don't have to re-load the damn thing every day just to hear something new. It's amazing to re-discover an album you haven't heard in a decade, all thanks to the wonders of "shuffle"
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
Which is exactly the reason I got a 20 gig iPod. My library is about 12 gigs right now which leaves me quite a bit of room to grow (I'm not going to say no one will ever use more than 20 gigs [read:640K] ).
I'd have gone for the 40 gig but the 20 is thinner. Check out the difference before you buy.
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.
Or in their cars (many cars have MP3 capable CD players now, and virtually all OEM head units are MP3 capable
I would guess there are also a ton of people who simply download MP3'S and burn them to cd's as audio CD's. That's what I do, and I've been doing it for the last 5 years. Sure, CD's are bulky, but I can get them free after rebate any day of the week, and throw them out when I get tired of them - and they run in any cd player. I remeber back in '98 when I had to use WinAmp to convert them to WAV files before burning in EZ CD Creator 3, now Nero burns audio CD's straight from mp3's.
The funny thing is I actually own an iPod, but still use cd's in my car. I bought a Transpodder, but it was a pain and not very clear, and it's easier to hit skip on a car cd player than an iPod. And less likely to get stolen.
I have blog like everyone else
...the iRiver iMP-400 looks promising
No uploading required. Just pop in your OGG/MP3 CD and you're away.
Ogg Vorbis support is in the works (via afirmware update), and can happily co-exist with the other codecs in firmware.
These guys seem pretty serious about vorbis. It's great to finally see a manufacturer taking this position.
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