Coming Soon - Music Albums Sold on Memory Cards
Just as vinyl once gave way to compact discs as the main physical medium for music, could CDs be replaced now by a fingernail-sized memory card?
Perhaps not entirely, but SanDisk Corp., four major record labels and retailers Best Buy Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are hoping that albums sold on microSD memory cards will at least provide an additional stream of sales.
The companies unveiled plans Monday to sell memory cards loaded with music in the MP format, free of copy protections. Called "slotMusic," the new format is meant to address two intertwined trends.
Most albums are still sold in a physical format — 449 million were sold on CDs in 2007, while 50 million were sold digitally, according to Nielsen SoundScan — yet CDs are decreasingly popular. Albums sold on CD dropped almost 19 percent last year.
Given this, the record labels — Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp. and EMI Group PLC — are hoping slotMusic can be another physical revenue source, and one that is more versatile than CDs given the kinds of gadgets people carry around these days.
Unlike when the CD was introduced and people had to buy new players, many people already have the ability to play slotMusic albums, since many cell phones and multimedia players support microSD cards.
These new albums will come with a small USB dongle that lets buyers use them with computers, too. [The USB dongle will also enable users to transfer the songs to iPods, which don't have memory-card slots, via a PC.]
Buyers will be able to use extra space on the cards to hold songs and photos from their own collections.
[The files will be MP3s encoded at a bitrate of 320 samples per second, the highest possible setting ensuring roughly CD-quality sound.]
The cards and dongles will come in boxes similar to current CD packaging, and Schreiber expects the cost of slotMusic releases to be "in the ballpark" of current CD prices.
It's not yet known exactly when — or how many — albums will be initially sold in the format, but Schreiber expects retailers to give a "sizable amount of shelf space" to slotMusic albums.
The albums are expected to debut at multiple retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores in the U.S., and later in Europe.
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i like to get one.It is already in market?