Music Companies’ slotMusic is Desperation in Action

The music industry is in worse shape than Wall Street, and it doesn’t deserve bail out. It isn’t expecting one either. Instead, Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp. and EMI Group PLC are backing a new format called “slotMusic.” They hope it will replace the CD because it can be used on almost any player system. It’s a nice try, but the smell of desperation is all too apparent.

As a piece of technology, the slotMusic idea is a rather nifty one. SanDisk is teaming up with the music companies as well as Best Buy and Wal-Mart to put music on 1 gigabyte microSD cards. That’s enough for an album, liner notes, cover art, and still have free space for the buyer to use for his or her own data storage needs. A great many cell phones and multimedia players support microSD cards, and the new albums will come with a USB dongle for other players that have USB ports.

Unfortunately, this is just another attempt by the music companies to keep their old business model afloat. Even since the Victrola, they have made their money by selling the data storage device (if that can be said of the cylinders used on the Victrola) and pretending that they were actually selling the data it contained. When home recording was impossible, there was no distinction. Once one could record at home, the data and the storage device were no longer one.

That still wasn’t too bad for the record companies. One still had to buy the album (or borrow it from a friend) to put it on cassette. The old “Home Taping Is Killing Music” drivel that was printed on album covers in the 1970s was an attempt to stop the lending of records, but it was doomed to fail. A few teenagers swapping the latest Alice Cooper disc wasn’t going to put them out of business.

What did doom the record industry as currently structured is digital recording and the computer revolution. Data no longer were attached to any physical device; they were suddenly free physically. The slotMusic approach is just another attempt to reunite the storage device and the data. It hasn’t worked before, and it won’t work this time.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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