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Creative, Apple Battle for MP3 Player Market
kurtz_tan writes "Creative Technology is spending 100 million in a marketing blitz to 'regain its rightful place in the audio industry' by trying to dominate the MP3 market which is now led by the Apple iPod (54% of the market last year for MP3 players that use hard disks). Creative is second with 16.5%. Does Creative Zen sound as cool as Apple iPod ?" And reader TheMediaWrangler writes "The Register reports that Apple will build a stockpile of flash-based iPods to be shipped as early as January or February of 2005. AppleInsider had the original scoop."
If you can judge by the presence of iPods in New York City (and you can't), you'd think there are no other MP3 players on the market. Everyone has an iPod here, to the point where it looks lame, too much of a fashion statement for my taste.
Simpy
I bought the Zen Nomad because it was certainly a lot cheaper than the comparable iPod at the time, and I liked it. Yes it was larger, but the battery was good. Now it's dead, and since I've gone iTunes I decided to switch. There's stuff I miss (like making playlists on the player itself) but I have to admit the iPod is really nice. The AAC files take about half the space as MP3s and sound better. I didn't do a scientific study but on several songs with quiet passages the MP3 version sucks compared to AAC, and the MP3 was encoded at the max bit rate.
And it's about half the size!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Creative is going on an all-out blitz/preemptive strike against Apple, which will immediately become a contender in January for the flash-based player market.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
The MP3 market is way too crowded, and is going to be retired eventually anyway. Instead of throwing money at it, create new markets and expand as much as you like in those.
The hybrid approach means you don't lose out because current MP3 sales are stronger than MP4 sales. It also means you get to chown the remnents of the MP3 when the bulk change over.
Of course, Creative won't do this. They'll slug it out with Apple, and someone else will corner the MP4 market, and both Creative AND Apple will lose out.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The first hard-drive based MP3 player I bought was a Creative. The second was an Apple. Why did I switch? Simple, the software that shipped with the Creative was lousy. I ended up buying the Notmad software from an independent third party and that was much better, but I really don't feel like I should have to. My MP3 player should just appear as an external hard drive in Windows, should work as easily in Linux, and the MP3 software should be of high quality as well.
I can't say I'm particularly impressed with iTunes, mind you, but at least an iPod appears as an external drive when I plug it in. I don't need to cart around extra software to install.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
...it's really no contest. I had a Creative 20 Gb Nomad Jukebox that I bought at the end of 2002. Had it for a year, and it was...serviceable. It was bulky (I know not a problem with the Zen as much), the interface was awful, and the software was beyond horrific. I got my iPod in December 2003. It's been flawless. My biggest gripe with it is shorter battery life, but that's only because I actually use it for 8 hours a day, unlike the Nomad, which was clunky in every way it was possible to be clunky. Sure, the iPod is luxury-priced, but it's worth it to me. I suppose Creative has improved their products (likely) and software (doubtful) since I last used them, but I wouldn't go back to try.
Well, there's a difference between audio and video on the PC and the consumer's perception:
Even the cheapest of CRT's these days is good enough to compare the output from a poor video source vs a near-perfect video source.
Audio, on the other hand, is often neglected. Most consumers don't have a great set of speakers connected to their PC, and even if they do are still listening to MP3's (which aren't the purest of audio sources). Low S/N, poor reproduction, etc is fine in a PC because most consumers don't demand better -- indeed, they cant even spot a difference in the sound quality.
FWIW, I agree with you, but we care and can discern good SQ vs bad, whereas just about everybody else doesn't care. It's easier to spot jaggies in a 3D game than it is to spot a "jaggy" in a sound file.
I think the OP was referring to Creative's other efforts in the sound market as much as they were referring to the Zen music players. Creative's legacy in the sound card market is suing Aureal under BS terms to drive them bankrupt, then selling the same sound card again and again(we're up to the 4th year that the Audigy has been their high-end card line). They even bought the assets of Aureal and Sensaura in order to keep other companies from easily coming in to the market with competitive products, which is made more difficult by the number of patents they own due to those acquisitions.
It's not like Creative to compete based on features - they're far more interested in getting a big enough piece of the market that they can slow down progress to a point where they can maximize profits on whatever the current generation is.
I think Creative's problem and the problem of all manufacturers is going to be the click wheel. I have used a lot of MP3 players over the years dating back to the Rio 500 and I have never seen a superior user interface. As long as Apple holds the patent on the touch wheel idea I don't think they are in any danger.
I have looked at the Zen Touch and Zen Micro and they might rate a distant second place but the click wheel is still by far superior. The Rio Karma is fine but not in the same class as either product. My advice to anyone looking to purchase an MP3 player; borrow a friend's G4 iPod for a day. If you are still able to consider another MP3 player after that I will be very surprised.
The iPod mini is $249, and the Micro is $249.
You mean the Creative Touch or Zen vs the iPod?
Inferior really is relative. The difference between the products, to me, is great enough that buying a Creative Zen Touch is like wasting $200 while buying an Apple iPod isn't.
GPL Deconstructed
You know up till quite recently Apple was all about saying over and over "Flash Sucks". Jobs made a point of dissing the Flash players during the interviews around the iPod Mini launch, even toting them on stage like trophies. And of course all the loyal Apple Maniacs went around repeating his NO FLASH mantra as if it were natural law.
I notice recently the anti-Flash hype within Apple has settled down to imperceptible...
The biggest argument made is that disk is cheaper for lots of storage. Well Flash is definitely not cheaper, but it does offer a different kind of convenience.
Say Apple sold a Flash player for $100 with minimal memory bundled but with an SD/CF slot.
Now, you can buy 1GB CF cards for arounnd $50 these days, and 1GB SD cards for around $60. And I've seen them go for $40 after rebate. Afvter rebate prices basically presage the sticker price in 4 months time...
So if you sell $100 iPods to "kids" or people who don't want to plunk down a larger bag of cash at once, then you can lock them in by selling them an "upgrade" 1GB (or the forthcoming 2Gb cards) for around $50 every few months.
Carrying around several SD cards is no big deal, they are tiny. You can get a caddy that holds 10Gb and is smaller than the end of your thumb.
Organizing different artists or genres on different cards also offers an easy, physical way for people to manage their collections without resorting to extreme tagging and playlist noodling.
One advantage of the Flash media model is also that the price of "upgrades" basically halves every 9 months or so. So if you don't want to add 5GB now, you can settle for adding only 1GB, knowing that in a year's time you could spend the same amount of money for another 2GB.
Consider also the possible business advantages of selling these low-end cards for Apple. The selling price of the cards could be subsidized by including bundled songs for a fee - a great way for record companies to distribute new music gratis. Or snippets of songs as adverts, jungles, or ringtones. This could lower the retail price of an Apple-branded "media card" by 10-20%.
Yes, even given the continued growth in capacity of flash media, they will never equal the price or capacity of hard disk media. However, at what point does enough space become too much? Lots of people seem to be happy with their iPod Minis, and they have a tiny capacity compared to some other options available.
It seems like lots of people are happy with just a few GB of music "on-hand" at any time. Hell, people get by with 256MB players! When and if Flash capacities reach the 4GB mark for $50 (I give it two years tops) then wouldn't a lot of the people who currently buy iPod Minis also consider a similar, half-priced iPod Flash?
That's a big market opportunity any way you slice it.
Of course, to really slim down Apple will have to do something about the iconic wheel interface. It's a nice design but it does take up a lot of front space on the device and constrains the screen size. Look at the iPod Photo - it's screen is lame and tiny ans resembles the old Archos Muldimedia players from a few years ago. At that time everyone lambasted them for releasing a "multimedia" player with such ridiculously tiny screens.
But Archos was just not thinking far ahead and went with maintaining their familiar audio jukebox interface. They learned from their mistake and upped the screen size on the newer models to take up most of the front panel.
What is the option for Apple? If they want to keep the wheel but shrinkthe devices *and* make the screen larger then they have to either A) put the wheel on the backside of the device, trusting users to navigate by touch, or B) convert the wheel into a software-simulation using on-screen display.
Apple has invested a lot of marketing collateral in their wheel design but it does constrain their effectiveness going forwward in a shrink of the iPod form factor for Flash sizes, especially for Asian markets where smaller is definitely much much better!
Da Blog
Apple has the Holy Trinity of online music: Software (iTunes), Store (iTMS), Player (iPod).
iTunes: Mac and Windows only
iTMS: Mac and Windows only, and infested with restrictive DRM
iPod: overpriced, can't play ogg or wma, short battery life, must be "authorized" on every PC it connects to
Why is this the "Holy trinity" of digital music?
Where did this quote come from? If it was said by somebody at Creative, that shows a remarkable sense of hubris and entitlement that is out of place in a competitive marketplace.
Just because you were first major player in the MP3 player market doesn't mean you are entitled to stay there. Look at Apple, they were first to the mass market with a GUI-based computer, and they didn't maintain any dominance there, did they? Apple's not even your real enemy; their iTunes player supported the Rio series in the early days, and still supports many of them on the Mac platform. Apple chose the high end player space; Creative chose the low end. Apple got lucky this time around. No sense whining about it...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
"Apple's offering, despite the nice physical design and great navigation, is too much bloat for way too much money in my eyes." Right, well, there's always going to be a minority viewpoint, of course. But the most important part of the design (love it or hate it) is the way it works between all three components of Apple's offering. It may be bloat. It may be expensive. It may be proprietary, but damn if using it isn't as easy as falling out of bed. People are willing to pay for easy. And even without this ease of use, Apple now has an overwhelming majority of the mindshare among the kinds of hipsters who can drive trends like this all the way to the stars and back. Call me when the Creative CEO is joined onstage by Bono and The Edge.
it's tied to an overpriced music store
overpriced? cheaper than most retailers, dude.
-mkb
"Personally, I want a player that doesn't require proprietary software to use."
Most hardware devices need specialized software to interface with it. You might think that just using it as a disk and managing your files yourself is better, but as someone who once handled their music that way I can say that is not true. But you can't understand until you've tried something better as I have.
"I don't want its main strength to be that it's tied to an overpriced music store that forces me to burn/crack/transcode to be used on half my audio hardware, or a inferior audio player (I'll stick to eMule, my own CD collection and Foobar, for the time being)."
I still buy all of my music on CD. So far nobody has showed up at my house and forced me to buy anything on the iTMS.
"Apple's offering, despite the nice physical design and great navigation, is too much bloat for way too much money in my eyes."
Wow usually people like you are complaining that iPods don't do ENOUGH stuff. How is it bloated? Your statement really is quite funny considering how easy they make managing and listening to music. You obviously haven't spent any time using one, so how can you say such things?
"And the physical design and navigation are quite bluntly just flat-out inferior to Apple's."
So what aspects of the design and, more importantly, what aspects of the navigation and UI of the Creative devices do you find to be superior to the iPod? I'll expect very detailed answers since you have obviously used both and are forming your conclusions based on fact. And I'll pretend like I don't already know it all comes down to the fact that it is cheaper.
"But the lack of ITMs? In my eyes, that's a good thing."
Yeah I hate having the iTMS as an option that is available to me if I wish to use it. Damn it I wish it was not available to me at all! I hate having options!
we're up to the 4th year that the Audigy has been their high-end card line
Non-pro and non-prosumer sound cards have matured for now. You hit 48KHz, 16-bit, surround sound, and you're basically done. In my experience, the other 3D stuff is more gimmick than quality. I have a Soundblaster around here somewhere but it's such a pain to deal with that I just use motherboard sound, which has also matured.
Now, if we standardized on a new super-MIDI or something that allowed for the really sophisticated effects modern professional synths have becoming available for dynamic music generation, that might be something. But as games seem satisfied to play static music off of MP3 or equivalent tech, and sound effect engines seem to all fit well within what a modern processor can do in its spare time, I don't think you're going to see any more advances in sound cards to speak of in the near future. The sound cards have basically matched the human ear, as far as the average consumer is concerned; anything you can hear can be generated by the soundcard with reasonable fidelity.
This is unlike video, where there is both extremely high interest in dynamic video generation (3D graphics), and even in video playback there is room for improvement.
So is Creative marketing the same card continuously for 4 years? Why not? What would they add to it that people actually want? (I've already given one idea, but clearly nobody wants it at the consumer level.) I'd want to diversify, too.
Hey, maybe what Apple's going to do is sell a flash player with a card slot, then sell preloaded flash cards. THAT would be a great idea for the industry. Slap in U2's new album, then slap in "1,000 metal hits," "1,000 easy listening tunes," etc.
:(
Just imagine the market for custom card mixes. Damn!
That would totally change the music industry.
I'm sure the Apple guys thought of it already. No patent for me
Word.
I have a 384 MB flash-based player (Rio S35S with expansion card) and it wouldn't be so bad if it had USB2/FireWire/Ethernet, but it doesn't, and it takes "forever" to reload a new set of tunes.
I'd love a hard-drive player; of course the high speed interconnect become more important. An iPod would be great if it worked with Linux, but I'm not talking about a Codeweavers "it almost works perfectly we think it's really almost useful" solution.
I'm eyeing something more "open" like an iRiver H120. Supports Ogg, works in Linux. Optical in/out! Lithium rechargeable battery.
What we're really dealing with here is more than one market. It doesn't make sense when they group everyone into a single "MP3 market" and claim that one company dominates it. For example, I could care less about the software and the music store. I just want a good solid player, and the ability to mount it as a removable disk. I already have the music -- all my cd's have been archived as FLACs, which I can easily convert to MP3 -- and I already have cp, rm, and ls which is all the software I want to deal with. Other people may care only about the software and store, and not even buy an ipod, and still other people may care about all 3 things.
So, apple is actually competing in 3 different markets at the same time with their music endeavors, and also a 4th seperate market which is the sum of the other 3. Apple may dominate the 4th market, but there's plenty of competition in each of the 3 sub-markets.
"I think the important statistic is: Apple's market share is more than Creative's market share"
Well, I'm one of 'Creative's market share' and my comment is "probably never again"
I've never seen such bad software (both Windows drivers, and on-board software), and having a bigger hard drive for less money than the iPod is starting to wear thin as an excuse for it.
Spend advertising money all you like, I'm not buying my replacement jukebox until it comes with Linux drivers that are guaranteed to work.
This would explain disparagement, but not vitriol. I actually got into an argument with an Apple-basher at college once, and it was during the System 7/Win95 era, where you concern mattered less.
That, and that it has so few games..
The worst flamage is in the developer and business spheres, not the hobbist/gamer space. This comic says it best for me...
But the most important reason is that their friends also hate it, but they have no idea why, only that their friends' friends also hate it.
This is about the only thing I can figure, except that too few people out there even know that Macs still exist; they think they stopped making them or something. This limits the "friends of friends" effect.
hen when I ask them what they know about Macs they say "well, I haven't used one since school, but..."
What's funny is that the "one" is more likely to have been an Apple ][, not a Mac. And the Apple ]['s were well loved in their day.
If I was more conspiratorially minded, I'd guess most Mac haters were decended from Commodore 64 and Amiga users, bitter that that company tanked, as well as getting too used to having many friends pirate games and software for them. (The social network makes it easier to pirate software on PCs than Macs.)
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Wow, a label selling their own stuff is cheaper than a retailer. Fancy that.
Actually iTMS is quite the deal if I want to check out Tresor's back catalog which is either expensively imported or discontinued.
Tresor, a small, independent label.
-mkb
love for open systems and rebellian against tyranny semms to be innate in me.
I see. That's why you had to wait for iRiver to add video support to your player, presumably in response to Apple upping the ante. That's not freedom, that's market competition. Unless you and I have different definitions of open systems. Or did I miss that day when iRiver went open-source?
You want freedom, try the really free open-source Rockbox. They even managed to add 30fps video playback to some of the 4-year-old Archos Jukeboxes, along with talking menu prompts, user bookmarking, and other goodies. And lucky for you, there's moves afoot to port the Rockbox code to at least some of the iRiver devices.
Da Blog
And for being able to use iTunes I would first have to spend the money to buy Windows XP since it won't run on Windows98 that I keep around just in case... Yes, it's cheaper - at least for me.
Usually I simply plug my iRiver into the USB hub, it gets mounted automatically as a removable HD under Linux or Windows 98 - and probably every other OS that has USB support - and I can do whatever I want with the songs on the player. What's so complicated about that?
I already have my music collection organized to my liking, in fact I did this long before I was able to afford a mobile player. I don't want some "I'm smarter than you" piece of software messing around with my collection or deleting songs from my player.
I'm probably too old-fashioned for iTunes. But somehow, I couldn't care less...
I have a music collection that is larger than the iPod's HD - at least larger than the discs of those I can afford. How does iTunes handle this? Judging from other posts here this is not so easy anymore.
Simple. Playlists, both standard and smart.
I only have a 10GB iPod and have probably 40+GB of music. I have smart playlists that filter based on mood, genere, etc. On top of that, I have a lot of my full albums as playlists (just select the songs and drag them to the playlist section and it'll create one named "Artist - Album"). It took a little while to create my album playlists but it's worth it. When you go to update your iPod, you just choose the playlists that you want. It works for me.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.