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Sony Admits MP3 Error
inflex writes "In a rare show admission of taking a wrong turn, Sony's officials have admitted that their stance on MP3 players was wrong." While this was pretty obvious to anyone who has ever shopped for a portable MP3 player, it is nice to see Sony admit their shortcoming. Ken Kutaragi puts it best when he says, "We're growing up," and with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
Sony admits MP3 error
Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo
January 21, 2005
SONY missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of the company's video-game unit said.
Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees had been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple's iPod, mainly because the Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights.
But Sony's divisions were finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Mr Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo.
"It's just starting," he said. "We are growing up."
Sony officials have rarely publicly said the company's proprietary stance was mistaken.
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Mr Kutaragi, who has long been viewed as a candidate to lead Sony, was unusually direct in acknowledging Sony had made an error.
Sony's music players did not initially support MP3 files and only played Sony's own Atrac format.
Sony's technology innovation had been "diluted", Mr Kutaragi said
"We have to concentrate on our original nature - challenging and creating," he said.
Once the powerhouse of global electronics, with success exemplified by its Walkman, Sony has lost some of its glamour lately, losing out in profitability and market share to cheaper Asian rivals.
Mr Kutaragi - known as the "Father of the PlayStation" for making the game machine a pillar of Sony's business - said the new PSP, or PlayStation Portable, handheld will grow into a global platform for enjoying music and movies as well as games.
The Associated Press
And even when they did bring out players (Net Walkman NW-E95/99) which supposedly play MP3 natively (rather than the download software converting to Atrac), they require Windows(tm) software to download the MP3s to the player. None of the adverts, neither the online retailers nor the product description on the Sony site, mention the need for Windows. Linux can mount the flash as a USB storage device and can download files, but no way will the player play them.
Apple's AAC has DRM in it.
my iPod mounts as a removable hard drive and is full of mp3s.
Before you read on, read this article by Steve Albini (one of the best known producers in the world) about the reality of the economics of the music industry. If anything it understates the degree to which the music industry is broken.
I'm a musician as are many of my friends. Musicians, or the vast majority of them anyway, do not make music to make money but to make music. Historically of course, it was ever thus. Before the means of recording music, there WAS no recording industry. The vast majority of great music in history was written without the RIAA's help and without the 'protection' of copyright. It didn't seem to bother Beethoven.
The small minority of professional musicians mostly make their money from live performances (cruise ships, bars etc). A small minority of the small minority of professional musicians make money from recording, but a large part of this is non-consumer oriented such as film soundtracks, game scores, stings, jingles, ads and so on.
The current inflection of the recorded music industry benefits only the major corporations and a few bands who have enough leverage to make deals that actually result in money. The vast majority of bands who record make little or no money.
If we were drowning in a sea of great music produced by the members of the RIAA I would be the first to defend them, but we aren't. We're drowning in garbage, and thousands of good bands languish unsigned and unproduced. You only have to watch American Idol to see how the process works.
Fortunately now the innards of a pro recording studio can reside on your home PC or Mac, and raison d'etre of the major studios no longer exists. Musicians can go back to doing what they have always done -- making music. Once the recording industry finally dies, those who make great music will earn lots of money from live performances and direct-pay-downloads spread by viral word-of-mouth.
If you think I'm wrong, consider this: poetry. Pretty much nobody makes any money out of poetry. But it still gets written. The same is true of music. The sooner the industry dies, the better.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
That would be the Apple iPod that had MP3 from day 1, Mr Thicky.
I seem to have plenty of non-encumbered AAC and MP3 files on my iPod. The Sony players required DRM enabled ATRAC only. You don't have to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store if you don't want to and your iPod will work fine. No, the iPod won't play .ogg files, but that is a very small loss compared to playing ATRAC only.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Its not surpising that sony took an anti mp3 stance, there are two obvious reasons.
They had been pushing mini disc since the mid 90's as the replacement for the walkman, a few years before the mp3 format surfaced.
They also own a lot of music labels as well as being a publisher themselves. The implied link with piracy that mp3 has always had (and still does) meant it would be very difficult for sony to get behind it. Imagine a sony owned label suing a pirate for having an illegal mp3 on their sony mp3 player, not that there is anything technically wrong with that scenario, it just looks like sony are sending out mixed messages.
Sony is whats known as a vertically integrated company, they make music and films, they also make the hifi's and televisions that you listen and watch with.
Considering how wide sony's product line is I am surprised the company doesn't run into more of these problems. It reminds me of fox news suing the fox channel for alledgedly slandering them in an episode of the simpsons. It was eventually stopped by rupert murdock himself, he quite sensibly decided it was silly for two companies he owns to sue each other. I am surprised this doesn't happen more often in the world of multi national conglomerates.
Does ZIP have a recovery record option yet?
I've been using RAR because it usually nets me a few extra % reduction, which I can reallocate to placing a recovery record.
I started doing this when I pulled some old CDs out that I had trouble reading. Typically, if a ZIP had an error, I was screwed. RAR has allowed me to repair files, etc.
I also like PAR files! Call me names now please.
Huh? One is an incompatible format that made using Sony players an incredible chore. The other is a universally-accepted format that, while frowned upon, doesn't encrypt content (and it can very easily be avoided by using a multi-region DVD player).
I think the GP was referring to that Sony does not make any multi-region DVD players, and is just about the only manufacturer who doesn't. And for the very same reason Sony had for not making MP3 players: the interests of Sony's music and film products were allowed to take precedence over the interests of electronics consumers.
I think primarily the minidisk players. I bought a NetMD player for my wife last year, and once music was on the thing, it was fantastic--Good price for the unit, unbeatable price for disks compared to equal capacity flash, the player was rugged and a good form factor. With native MP3 support and decent software for transferring files, it's only real rival would have been the iPod.
Unfortunatly the software made it nearly impossible to put music from MP3's on the player, even though there was a big MP3 label on the box. Both buggy and with a horrible user interface. Putting a batch of MP3's on is a two-stage process with lots of individual steps requiring user interaction, lots of time and a good chance it would crash before you were done. If that part was easier, I'd have bought several more players, but as is nobody wants to use the one we have.
Ever wonder why they aren't here in the US? Ever wonder why you can rent movies, console video games, heck even music videos, but not music?
Because the industry got it coded into law, forbidding "rental, lease or lending". Japan has no such law, which is why CD rental stores are common there. Note the same law is also why you can rent console video games, but not PC video games.
Libraries were fortunate enough to have been given and excemption, which is why you can borrow music CDs from your local public library.
La cringely begs to differ HD is in Steve's sights and iFilms - that's the future.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious