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Big Demand for Digital Music Players
An anonymous reader writes "Market research company IDC is predicting a rosy future for MP3 player sales. They predict that by 2008 it will grow into a $58 billion industry - four times bigger than the US record industry. Also in the news, Sony will finally start making a digital music portable that plays MP3s. Their present players only read their proprietary ATRAC3 format, forcing you to transcode any MP3 files you want to play on them."
Didn't it go mainstream a few years ago? Napster made it mainstream.
You watch, in 10 years we'll be trying to get rid of the mp3, but it simply won't vanish ( due to cluelessness, but still ).
Regardless, I'd like a decent sub $100 mp3 player with decent storage. ipods are damn cool, but there is no way I'm dropping that kind of cash on what is essentially a fluff item.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
$58Bn is about $10 for every person in the world icluding babies. By 2008 there will be cooler things to spend your hard earned money on.
I predict that sales will grow 5.4 fold. Really, how solid are their figures?
For anyone who is excited or dismayed about this it's worth recalling that McKinsey, who are about the smartest and best consultants in the world made a prediction for the number of cell phones that would be in the world by 2000 in 1990. They were out by a few orders of magnitude. Motorola built the Iridium network on the basis of these figures and similar predictions and took a bath.
Don't get too excited. This is just some press release with a few ads.
This obviously makes sense seeing as mini hard drives are dropping in price so it is becoming reasonable to carry around a large collection of music with you (thus making it better than just carrying around a CD player).
However, I wonder if its at all sustainable. I mean, once you have a 40 gig player, I can't imagine needing much more. Sure, there are a few people who want more, and maybe there is a market for video players, but I think the current line is all I would need for now. Sort of like how CD players have just sort of stagnated. There are no real improvements, they just get cheaper. The only reason to buy a new one after your first is if it breaks. Will there be any real innovation in the mp3 player market?
GMail invites for completed freeipods.com of
The problem is, its not solid state. I've seen CD players that say you can jog with them, but how many can actually stand up to that much jostling, same with any type of excercise. Also, being a player with a motor (gotta spin the CD up) it consumes a lot more power than solid state device. Finally, a solid state device can be a lot smaller than a CD player.
LOL, only on Slashdot is that a troll instead of offtopic.
You know that's not what the article is about. A CD player that plays MP3s does not fall under the "digital music player" umbrella.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
The constant in life is change. Good-bye "cassette tape".
I didn't understand why Sony didn't come out with something that played mp3's in the first place. Did they think people would be on top of replacing huge mp3 collections with their format...I don't think so.
"If it sucks without butter, it still sucks with butter, only creamier." - AC
apple frequently sale refurbished ipods for around 200$.
Sony still doesn't get it:
For the time being, Sony customers will have to be satisfied with MP3 support in flash-based players, which could come as early as this year... The company is also considering expanding MP3 support to hard disk devices, sources told ZDNet France, but no decision has yet been made on that front.
Is it that hard to one unified plan? Why the restrictions on HD-based models. "It's OK to pirate music, provided it's less than 256 MB!"
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
I can't wait for the inevitable front page /. story one year from now proclaiming a glut and collapse in the portable MP3 player market.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Wouldn't you hate to be in the boardrooms of the empire music groups now that estimates put digital music as a $58 billion industry? Big Executive: "Why didn't we get in on this music market!!!" Peon: "You said we needed to sue everyone that had anything to do with digital music" Dare I even say piracy breeds inovation? ::rolls eyes:: Look at the markets created from cassett tapes, VCRs, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and now digital music is an incredibly booming industry... I sure feel bad for the dinosaurs at the RIAA who decided to go after p2p instead of trying to adapt in a profitable manner...
Once they start enforcing DRM in the mp3 players, then the 'demand' for them will drop..
Only the diehards ( and clueless ) will buy them at that point..
Much as the MD market is now.. either you are clueless of the restrictions, or you find a way around them as you are determined to be able to do what you want with your own music, and have it portable.. ( though I do agree lack of marketing on Sony's part hasn't helped much either, most average Joe types don't know what MD is... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They're banking on selling to the "idiot consumer who doesn't know what they're doing and buys the first thing he hears about" demographic. I think Apple already has that demographic, and many others, covered as far as digital music goes.
XVID and DIVX are implementations of MPEG4
I finally bought an iPod because I was getting an audible.com account and I could get $100 off an iPod. I bought a new 4g iPod, which I love slightly less than my mother. Where was Sony? Where is my MP3 walkman? Man, they have the money, mind and moxy, why the hell is Apple getting the industry (other than the fact that Jobs has balz = steel and they hired a great marketting firm).
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Does it have an interface as simple and effective as the iPod's? I doubt it.
It's one thing to have fancy features, or a low price. It's another to be useful. I could operate my iPod in my sleep.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Minidisc had the potential to be a huge cash cow for Sony, but for every step they took forward, they took two steps back in the name of "Rights Management." Had they initially released the format without DRM restrictions, you'd have MD data readers in a huge section of the home-computer market, and they'd have beaten the whole ~1GB portable-storage market before it started.
ATRAC sounds great, but since music MDs and data MDs are two completely different (and incompatible) things, the whole idea is crippled. If that barrier didn't exist, there'd be no market for the flash-players out there, and Sony would be sitting on top of the world. Same goes for the appalling mess that they made of NetMD. If MD portables acted as simple mass-storage devices, they'd be huge (and in time, cheap), and folks wouldn't see a need for a HDD-based mp3 player. It's a wonderful format for live recording, but when you're done, how the heck do you get it uploaded to a PC? You just don't. I still have a great Sharp unit that I use for recording, but it's a pain to have to play it into the line-in jack of my PC in realtime just to edit and store the thing.
If only they had done it right...
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
Sony supports MP3 on its CD products, but not in its best digital products which is what most people think of when it comes to MP3/music players.
The real story here is shift in business strategy. Sony was the king of portable music after the introduction of the Walkman, but has seen its share slip. It seems that someone at Sony has realized that using a closed, proprietary standard and forcing customers to listen to their music collections how Sony wants them to quickly turns them into ex-customers.
That is big news for Sony. The Sony PSP is coming and Sony has decided to introduce yet another proprietary standard: the Universal Media Disc, which will be hardly universal if Sony is the only one that uses it.
Original post follows:
You would be surprised to find out how good an iPod (or any of the better competing models) can be if you use lossless codecs like FLAC or Apple's ALAC.
These codecs work like ZIP, no loss of quality or detail unlike MP3, and if you listen to subtle music (e.g. classical or jazz) in a not too noisy environment, it will make a big difference.
I am in the process of re-ripping my classical CD collection to ALAC, and once I am done, I won't have to touch a silver disc again - my G5 streams CD audio to my AV amplifier via Toslink optical fiber digital audio, and on the go, I have an iPod 15GB (3rd gen), which can store roughly 50CD's worth of lossless audio.