SanDisk's New SlotMusic: But Why?

Kevin Maney writes: As the world seems to march toward downloaded or streamed digital music, SanDisk today is unveiling a new physical medium for music. It's called slotMusic, and it's basically an album on a thumbnail-size microSD card. Four of the major music labels -- Warner, Universal, Sony, EMI -- are supporting it with MP3, unprotected music. So you'd go into a Wal-Mart, pay about $10 for the card, and slip it into your cell phone or any other gadget with a card slot. SanDisk says it will be almost as simple to use as putting a CD in a player. The MP3 songs can be moved around or copied anywhere. And you can write to the card, adding more of your own music into whatever storage space is left.

I talked to SanDisk executive Dan Schreiber about slotMusic. Unable to imagine the iPod generation wanting anything to do with going to a store to buy music on anything made of atoms, I asked if this is aimed at, like, old people. "Some of it is an age thing," he said. "But it's about instant entertainment. Downloads continue to thrive, but not everybody wants to spend half their day curating playlists." He added that slotMusic "tested well with young guys who liked the gee-whiz factor." Although, I always take those kinds of results with a grain of salt. Young guys can think a lot of things are gee-whiz...for about five minutes. Whether they'll actually buy it or not is a whole different question.

There doesn't seem to be much question about whether SanDisk did this product well. It seems to be inexpensive and easy to use, and the deals with the record labels mean slotMusic will have plenty of content in a DRM-free format, which is what consumers want these days.

The slotMusic cards are so small, retailers could carry a solid selection in a small space. If nothing else, it could be a perfect product for a booth in an airport -- where travelers might want new music for a flight but have limited ways to get it onto a device. Even then, we're talking about selling to generations that are less tech savvy -- and, generally speaking, not the biggest music buyers. But maybe slotMusic will find a niche there.

"SanDisk is in the business of displacing legacy media with silicon," Schreiber told me, explaining the company's rationale for the product. "We replaced floppy drives with USB drives. More recently, hard drives are succumbing to flash drives.Optical media will succumb to semiconductors as well. The CD seemed like a natural place to start."

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