SD: the new CD?

With CD sales dropping despite a demonstrable increase in music consumption, you might think that music fans just aren't as interested as they used to be in paying for tunes. Or you could believe in the spirit of hope springing eternal, and that the problem is with the CD itself. If you're in the latter camp, then you should be cheered by the announcement this morning that the four major record companies plan to experiment with a new physical format for albums: microSD cards. See my colleague Michelle Quinn's piece about the deal here.

Now, if you're convinced that the CD is dying because there are a plethora of free sources of music online, you're probably scoffing at the prospects for albums sold on a microchip -- or any other shrink-wrapped container, for that matter. But Daniel Schreiber, a senior vice president at SanDisk (the company behind microSD cards and the prime mover behind the "slotMusic" initiative) has a question for the skeptics: how do you think people are going to load tunes onto their shiny new music phones?

According to Schreiber, 750 million new mobile phones will be shipped this year with microSD card slots. It's a safe guess that most of those phones will have the software needed to play MP3s. I'd also speculate, though, that most owners won't find them particularly easy to load with songs -- after all, only one phone works seamlessly with iTunes, the most popular digital jukebox program. That's where the 1 GB slotMusic cards come in: they're plug and play.

Schreiber said that downloadable music outlets such as Apple's and the wireless carriers' music stores have an important role to play, but they're not for everybody. "The simplicity of two things just plugging into each other is hard to replicate," he said. With microSD cards, there's no need to copy tracks onto a computer and recopy them onto the device. It's just like buying a CD. And the music files on the cards will be MP3s, just as unfettered by DRM as the tracks on a compact disc.

Whether the cards are priced just like CDs remains to be announced, as does the launch date and the titles that will be available. (Wal-Mart and Best Buy are among the retailers that will carry the cards, so chances are good that they won't sell for the MSRP.) One advantage that the cards have is that the content doesn't have to be static -- it can be changed dynamically through the Internet or linked to a storehouse of material online.  That makes for some interesting capabilities, such as the possibility of adding personalized content after the purchase or loading bonus tracks that can be unlocked for an extra fee.

Here's something else to think about: a decade ago, disc players were ubiquitous. Cars had them. Boom boxes had them. And battery powered CD players dominated the market for hand-held devices. But with MP3 players and mobile phones taking over the portable musical entertainment function, disc readers have grown increasingly scarce. In their place you'll find hard drives and flash memory. That trend favors the slotMusic initiative. Of course, some manufacturers (read: Apple) haven't supported removable memory, which doesn't help SanDisk and its allies. More important, to judge from what happened to other formats that have popped up in the past two decades, the availability of a ton of content on microSD will be crucial to its success. If the labels treat slotMusic as a curiosity, it's probably doomed. It will be interesting to see how the wireless companies respond, too. If they view the SD cards as a competitor to their own music stores, that'll be yet another hurdle for SanDisk and its allies to overcome.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Photo courtesy of SanDisk's website

Comments

[Michael Selvidge]

I think this will be a horrible failure. I think what the declining CD sales and Blu-Ray's Pyrrhic victory show us is that physical media is dead.

Also, who wants to listen to a whole album on their phone? For that matter, one of the reasons iTunes is so successful is that you can download a la carte, so who today wants to buy full albums anyways?

No one (en masse) will ever buy full length physical albums again, those days are just over. Seriously, do you know anyone who would buy these?

[Davis Freeberg]

Nothing but hype. I'm able to get music onto my phone right now without a card and it's 5 years old. Considering that the new phones will have wifi, I don't see music transfers as being all that big of a problem. Remember when flash drives were supposed to displace the DVD? I'm still waiting for that one to happen. This is just Sandisk trying to invent a new product/revenue stream instead of addressing a need in the marketplace.

[T. D.]

As you point out, CDs worked because of convenience. As the successor to cassettes, they also offered improved sound quality. Downloads and streaming offer the ultimate in convenience, and also show that many people are willing to sacrifice some sound quality for portability.

An SD card is a physical medium that delivers digital audio in a format less convenient than countless other methods already widely available. It's arguably the most wrong-headed move the majors have yet made in their journey to sustainability.

If the majors want to reinvigorate demand in the physical medium, they need to retool their thinking. Vinyl has survived many decades for its superior audio quality. However, this analog format has suffered from many of the same technological flaws for forty years - they are not very durable, they are cumbersome, and offer relatively short playing times.

If the majors would focus their attention on a new, better analog playback medium, one that offers more durability, even higher fidelity, and longer playing times than vinyl, it would at least find a sustainable, long-term niche in a market willing to pay a premium for these benefits.

[Andrew Warner]

What a joke.

Are they really expecting people to walk around with a pocket full of these tiny things? And once someone is done with an album, will they have to struggle to take that tiny card out of their phone and replace it?

No one will use this. We need to move forward (to digital) not backwards.

[Todd Williams]

No.

[P.C.]

I hope the big 4 record companies decide to do the MP3 encoding with the highest quality encoders from the full size master file using a 320 kbits/sec bit rate & 48 kHz sampling. As long as the engineers are going for the best MP3 file they can make, it might be marketable as "HI QUALITY". I have read they are going to use a 1GB SD card.

It's obvious this is set up to sell cards, not music. Why else use a gig for a cd's worth of music in a compressed format? 256 would be more than enough. 512 would work for flac, for god's sakes....

[charles rinehart]

I am a dinosaur-that is, I like going to ameoba in hollywood, browsing through the aisles, and find that one or two cds or dvds for a real good price. I like to hold an album, looking at the artwork that you can't get with a digital download. The only reason someone would think a cd, dvd, or an album is "inconvenient" is that i takes some space to keep, and have to be taken care of. I tried music from a website, listened to it on my computer, and promptly went back to my cds and cassettes- it was so much simpler! I really resent the fact that to take advantage of this wonderful technology, you either have to have a computer or a very hard to program phone(which seem to get smaller and smaller, difficult to use with bigger, thicker fingers). No thanks, I'll stay with the technology that is easy to use-and, so being, are actually more convenient.

[Randy Shiner]

It's no wonder this country is in a depression. With chuckleheads sitting around a room thinking up ways they can put lipstick on a pig and call it honey-baked ham, or, in this instance more particularly, a "thing" to contain music like a SD card. Will that card have DRM? Of course. No label will allow their artists to sign on to the SD card without it, to the detriment of even potential consumers of this glue-factory-bound nag of an idea. Given the times and the changing nature of the music business, this is without doubt the worst idea for a new format of music presentation since the wax cylinder. The only way this succeeds is if mobile phones have a substantial convergence technologically with .mp3/.mp4 players like the Ipod, Zune, and the rest. If that convergence does not happen, and I don't believe it will (why should manufacturers shoot themselves in the foot by having two items when they can sell you two?), this idea is as dead as Anton Chiguhr's last victim.

[PABLO ZUNIGA]

I THINK THIS IS A PERFECT SOLUTION! THIS WILL HELP SO MUCH WITH OUT THE NEED FOR COMPUTERS! NO MORE SCRATCH CD'S ALL OVER YOUR CAR, TAKING ALL YOUR SPACE. SMALLER SD MEMORY CARDS ALBUMS MEANS MORE SPACE AVAILABLE IN YOUR HOME, CAR, AND LUGGAGE. AND IF THIS IS A SUCCESS, DVD/BLU-RAYS WILL GO THIS ROUTE WHICH MEANS MORE SPACE AVAILABLE AND YOU CAN WATCH A MOVIE ON YOUR PHONE WHILE SITTING ON A PLANE. THEY ALREADY MAKE CAR DECKS THAT ONLY ACCEPT SD CARDS ONLY, NO CD SLOT! THE FUTURE IS AT HAND! I STOP BUYING CD'S TO SO I CAN PREPARE TO BUY SD CARD ALBUMS!

[Ron Davis]

There was a fundamental problem with CD, and now that is going to repeat with SD. That is the ease at which music can be uploaded on the Internet as either MP3 files or as Torrents. That has resulted in a boom in both Music Piracy and the Piracy Industry.

The reason of this is quite simple. It is the decision of music label like Sony BMG and others to outright discard audio cassettes.

Behind what is said of audio tapes there are some benefits with them : That smallness of the scale of piracy - they are normally off line media and converting them to MP3 is not as much as a scale and quality of direct upload of SD Card or CDs on to the Internet. Self-bookmarkability of audio cassettes have never been achieved with the so-called high tech media. Third is long term durability and lack of obsolescences. Tapes are the longest serving media in the century and are still far from dead.

The only thing dead about tape is lack of further R&D and new standards. Why is the only self-bookmarking media, Compact Cassette not been updated with backward compatible standards. It just stopped with Dolby S.

Why is a Mp3 version of CompactCassette not been developed?

Ok, going away the traditional CompactCassette, why is DAT640 or DCC formats not been promoted? Sure, these maintain the traditional benefits of analog audio tapes - self bookmarkability.

Yeah, every thing is great about CDs and DVDs and now SDs particularly they have made music virtually free to download.

[Joseph Rooks]

Looks like it's time for another stupid move by short-sighted people who seem to be disconnected from the world outside their supply chains.