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."

Comments

Mainstream

[MikeMacK]

Is digital music finally going mainstream?

Didn't it go mainstream a few years ago? Napster made it mainstream.

Re:Mainstream

[e9th]

I think the CD made it mainstream.

What were they smoking?

[geneing]

Don't you think market research is useless?

$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.

That's funny

[sien]

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.

Makes sense...

[echeslack]

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?

Re:They already do...

[Nos.]

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.

End of Cassette Tape

[reporter]

The proliferation of MP3 players means the end of the cassette tape and analog recordings. Henceforth, "recording" means (1) sampling the audio signal to convert it into a digital signal, (2) compressing the digital data into MP3 format, and (3) writing it into flash memory (or other persistent high-capacity storage). "Playing the recording" means (1) reading the digital data from flash memory, (2) decompressing the data, (3) lowpass filtering the data to convert it back into an analog audio signal.

The constant in life is change. Good-bye "cassette tape".

/RIAA slaps forehead...

[DownWithTheMan]

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...

Re:iPod=loose

[Kenshin]

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.

Sony dropped the ball on MD

[erik_fredricks]

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...