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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."
now that sony will be actual compition, do you think that the ipod/ipod mini will be not in first place anymore? i want a good ipod for $200 without havibg to go to ebay. btw, i doubt it, but first post??
And I own one... It's called a CD/MP3 player and you can get one at any Target, Wal-Mart, etc.
They go for less than $50 and they hold as much space as blank CD-Rs you are willing to buy.
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 have a Neuros and its far from just an "MP3 Player". My Neuros plays MP3's, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and even the dreadful WMA files...
I hate when people call it an "MP3 Player".
<shameless plug>
If you haven't looked the Neuros, you don't know what you are missing. It's the perfect player for the geek in you. Recently they have open sourced the Firmware, allowing us hackers to have our way with it.
</shameless plug>
As long as people also remain willing to pay for music to support the music industry. If people fail to support the artists and music production slows down, people will have less need for a place to keep their music.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
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 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
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.
that by 2008, none of the recording companies will allow me to purchase an MP3 in a store.
I don't think I'll be shelling out for one till it plays mp3/aac/ogg. mmm it'd be nice if Sonys new 1Gig MD system would allow for multi format tunes. Think it only plays ATRAC though, of course. :(
About bloody time. Sony's portable music players (even their new hard-drive player) are a joke.
It takes a special kind of asshat to make a portable music player with no MP3 support.
Sony, welcome to 1999!!!
40 gigs ought to be good enough for anyone?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Like almost all "analysts", it's about as solid as pea soup.
I worked in the IT department for a company that distributed analyst white papers, and these people were dumb as fucking bricks, according to the people in the company who had to deal with them on a daily basis. Like, "well, I can't figure out how to email this so I'm going to print and fax it to you", dumb.
As IT workers we were continuously astounded by how poor the reports were, making ludicrous predictions and giving blatantly bad advice. As others on slashdot have said- people pay for and buy these reports to justify positions, not to learn how to do something. When I googled names of authors on the papers- some of which dealt with hugely complex corporate IT problems- the authors were fresh out of college, often with a degree that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter. Ie- INTERNS, people!
It's like the old "it came into my email box, it must be true" adage, only with a real company with a fancy website and a list of clientele a mile long telling you that "sure, it's perfectly ok to dump water on your computers." Everyone's too concerned about looking stupid to admit they're being had.
Please help metamoderate.
Look at these clowns trackrecord for the Itanium
Help fight continental drift.
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.
Sony wanted to do MP3 a long time ago, but it was their devision tied to the entertainment industry that FORCED them to use a propritary format...such as ATRAC3.
It's just a legal roadblock and civilwar for sony, not one of ignorance.
Life is not for the lazy.
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
Well if their MP3 players turn out to be anything like there more recent VCRs then I won't be wasting my money on them.
:-)
I bought a top-of-the-line Sony VHS VCR back in 1991 and it lasted 10 years, giving an exceptional picture and brilliant audio.
The top-of-the-line Sony VHS VCR I bought in 1999 gave nowhere near as good a picture and just died, lasting only half as long as the previous one.
The top-of-the-line Sony VHS VCR I bought in 2000 was even worse in respect to its performance and died back in late 2001 -- lasting less than two years.
The 21" Sony TV I bought back in 1992 is still going strong and gives an excellent picture. The 29" set I bought in 1999 has crapped out twice and the tube is showing pronounced signs of softness. The picture geometry has also gone to hell in a handbasket.
If this trend continues, that Sony MP3 player probably won't make it to the shop doorway before it craps out.
As an electronics tech I took a look at the Sony VCRs and have to say that the standards of design and construction have fallen significantly in the 10 year period from my first to most recent purchase.
I don't buy Sony gear any more -- they used to be a premium brand with excellent quality but now it's actually worse than some of the cheaper stuff on the market. The budget 2-head NEC VCR I bought at the same time as the 2000-model Sony is still going strong.
When it came time to buy a new camcorder, I bought a Panasonic and have been *very* pleased with the results. Even my friends who spent 50% more on a Sony camera are very impressed (and kicking themselves a little
Sony? I don't think so.
... I'd really like it if someone (I don't care who) made a cheap CD player with a couple of MB of flash ROM [or something similar], so people can upload their own decoders for whatever format they wish to use the player with... it'd be insanely successful with the public (and I'll buy it as well), as people could shove on OGG, MPC, MP3Pro, anything they want to use, they just port it [with instructions and maybe a dev kit given by the manufacturer, of course]. Oh, and battery life. No huge backlit battery-consuming LCDs with uber displays. I've got a Panasonic SL-SX420. The LCD has cracked partly. Not like I needed it anyway. All I need to see is what track number it is, and that's it. Plus, in winter, say you're walking to school. The liquid in the LCD takes more energy to refresh as minutes/tracks change on the display), consuming your battery. The only useful features would be a small graphical equalizer, volume up/down, lock, play, stop, next, and back. That's all I need. Yes, I realize it's only my view, and someone else might have a completely different view. But then again, I'm just saying what I'd like introduced to the market. An ultra-slim CD player, with insanely low battery usage, the basic controls, a nice EQ, and an USB port so we can flash our decoders on. All for less than CAN$150 :)
Ahh, dreams...
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
Get a Creative Jukebox Zen Xtra (30gigs, $199 at frys). Bigger (more gigs) than an Ipod, better sound quality, and about half the price. The only thing the Ipod has is a slightly better interface (slightly) and is a status symbol.
The Creative has a nice browser feature once you install the drivers on your computer too. I've been very happy with mine.
Sony supports MP3 on its CD products, but not in its best digital products which is what most people think of when it comes to MP3/music players.
The real story here is shift in business strategy. Sony was the king of portable music after the introduction of the Walkman, but has seen its share slip. It seems that someone at Sony has realized that using a closed, proprietary standard and forcing customers to listen to their music collections how Sony wants them to quickly turns them into ex-customers.
That is big news for Sony. The Sony PSP is coming and Sony has decided to introduce yet another proprietary standard: the Universal Media Disc, which will be hardly universal if Sony is the only one that uses it.
Original post follows:
There are other reasons to favor the Neuros over the iPod, but those are the big ones.
But, as for everything, personal preferences play a huge role in your selection of a personal music device (PMD).
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
According to the Fortune 500 list, M$ and Apple are resp. :
46. Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., 47, $32.187
301. Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, Calif., 300, $6.207
billon dollar businesses. - Now according to Steve Jobs himself (from WWDC2004) the ipod's have a +50% market share (mesured by units!).
- - -
Ok, now let's do some *simple* math! :).
$58 Billions * 0.50+ = $APPLE.MP3.PROFITS+
${APPLE.MP3.PROFITS}+ + 6.207 = $35.207+ Billions
- - -
say, if M$ has to compete with the 'Linux Desktop' for markes share(s), which *let's assume will* hamper them from further increasing *much* ... APPLE would by 2008 at least catch up to them ... simply by not competing for the 'Desktop' :-)
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
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.