With organizers being phased into phones, so goes the MP3 player…
You’ve probably heard that Verizon (owners of America’s largest wireless broadband
network) is launching new cell phones which can download music wherever you
are. There has also been talk of an Apple / Motorola deal to make iTunes
compatible phones.
That’s pretty cool, right? Carrying around a single device. Instant musical
gratification wherever you are. A new kick-ass phone designed by Apple.
But it IS about the music, right? I mean, a lot of us like pretty weird
music, stuff that isn’t readily available to be purchased online. Does that
matter to the American Idol loving audience? What about having to download
music every time you want to listen to a song? Would you be willing to give
up carrying around your "collections"?
What do you think? Would you rather carry around only one device? What about
paying for music the same why you pay for other mobile phone services like
ringtones? Would you jump all over it if someone managed to make a flawless
interface and it sounded great? Agree? Disagree?
Posted by Sasha Koren
Comments
Connections
I think “telephone’s” the wrong word/concept…it’s a handset, and the real question is, do we have another case of Jobs vs. world on our hands. (Remember Apple was in talks with Motorola to phone-enable iPod before Steve reportedly kicked Zander out of his office (although Motorola claims the deal’s still alive: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000120040905/.) If it is Jobs vs. the world, my money’s on world.
Of course, everyone would rather carry one device, but here we get into technical issues of power consumption and heat dissapation. The one-device vision has been around since the Newton days. It took a number of engineering breakthroughs to make a portable HD (hence iPod), more are necessary to cram all the stuff you need into a reasonable form factor. I’d give it about 18 months.
For payment, I strongly prefer the all-you-can-eat (Rapsody) subscription model to the iTunes/ringtones nickle-and-dime-me-to-death model. But I the main point’s the industry economics…interface and sound quality are not the main impediments to celestial jukebox nirvana. Distribution control and digital rights management are the issues. The industry refuses to relinquish its distro windows maodel, which is why eventually the internet, which mobile devices will eventually be a seamless part of, will force them to adapt or perish. But few of them have acknowledged this, and SCOTUS has given them false hope that legal recourse can restore the container that long ago disintigrated.
iTunes stands as a testimony to the fact that the market is so hungry that even the simplest and most limited kind of model can be successful. Imagine if it were actually possible (as it is in Rapsody) to discover new music with a model like that.
if apple were to come up with an mp3-celly, there is no reason to give up song collections… it’d be more like adding cellular tech to the iPod… better thinking, better market relevance, same brand loyalty.