May 13, 2004
Dumbshit Dept.
Sony's troubles
Sorry for the light blogging as of late. I find that when I am cranking out lots of code (and reviewing/commenting papers too) I have little energy left for blogging. :-(
Anyway, I've been meaning to speak up about Sony's new Connect service that was talked about at the FOM summit. Turns out that Sony screwed the royal pooch in this one -- they are using their own proprietary format ATRAC, which further fragments the downloaded music space. But the real kicker, as Joe Gratz points out, is that their portable player to go with Connect will play nothing but their ATRAC format.
This is a classic customer lock in strategy. However, when you are first entering a market, lock in strategies will only lock customers out. Sony is new in the downloadable music space and putting out a player that only plays their format requires people to buy new music (as sony hopes) or have people convert their existing music to ATRAC. The latter is a royal pain in the ass that is guaranteed to not sound good. Sony is aiming for a terrible user experience all around the farm. Sony may be mighty, but Apple is smarter and more nimble.
And as iTunesPeriPod points out, 21 iTunes tracks have been sold for each iPod sold. That's less than 1% for each iPod. How many people are running around with full iPods? (hint: most people's iPods are full -- mine is). And if you legally downloaded all that music, your $500 iPod would be loaded with $10,000 worth of music. Now, I am sure that no-one who has 10,000 tracks in their iPod, paid $10,000 for the music.
This show's Sonys cockiness -- or stupidity. Depends on how you look at it. Few will take the time to convert their MP3 stash to a proprietary format. And if every customer buys 21 tracks from the Sony Connect service for their new Sony portable player, I can tell you exactly what will happen to the download service. At this point, I doubt it will be around in a year without major changes -- or even at all.
Posted by Mayhem at May 13, 2004 10:56 AM
My 30GB iPod is a little over half full, and all of the music (except maybe two or three tracks) is legal. Then again, I have a lot of CDs I've bought over the last two decades, so it's easy to fill up 30GB by just ripping what I already listen to.
JOhn.
I can see that -- a large chunk of my music collection came from CDs that I purchased over the last 15 years. And given the price of a CD, over time this comes to more than $10,000 as well.
However, you and I are more than your average music fans. I doubt that most people you see (especially young people) have this kind of history. Thus I have to question where all that music came from.
I definitely have to agree. While my iPod is full (only 5,000 tracks on mine,) every single one of those tracks is legal. So are the additional 55,000 tracks on my Mac. While I admit to having downloaded unpurchased music, that was only to find out if the album was worth purchasing.
It's simple, to me: if it's no good, it's not worth keeping. If it's worth keeping, it's worth buying.
At the same time (and this is the part where I agree) there are several younger people I work with--none of whom have the extensive commercial music background that I have (my father has been in the radio industry for decades.) These folks I work with are quite proud of their illegal MP3 collection that spans over 300GB.
I just don't get it.
These same people also have hundreds of gigabytes devoted to electronic (pirated) books. Yes, 100s of GBs--that's a lot of e-books. I look around at my book collection (currently consisting of 38 boxes, 37 of which are in storage, as well as a few dozen on the shelf) and wonder if I'm the strange one.
