Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
$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>
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".
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!!!
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.
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...
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?
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.
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
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.