Ah. Remember the pre digital music era? Remember cassette tapes filling the bottom of your rucksack on long trips? Saturday afternoon trips to the local Woolworths to see if you could find that song you heard on the radio? Being stuck with the same album again and again because you forgot to swap the tape? Losing the tape (but never, it seemed, the case)?
Then Napster came along, then the iPod, then iTunes made it all legit. We could download, mix up singles and albums, build our own playlists and carry a zillion tracks with us wherever we go, all safely backed up at home. Singles become an impulse buy, your taste broadened, life changed, and I’m not hearing many saying it wasn’t for the best.
Until now. SanDisk – which clearly needs to sell some more memory cards, fast – has partnered up with the big four music labels to offer us… albums on a memory card! This genius wheeze, called slotMusic (note wild capitalisation in the name – Down Wit Da Kidz!) will see big retailers in the US – Walmart, Best Buy, doubtless Woolies if it ever reaches the UK – selling cards preloaded with entire albums from big artists.
Consumers need simply to go to a store, choose from the array of literally more than two dozen artists available, buy one for $7 to $10 a pop, locate the spare MicroSD slot on their mobile phone – it may be under the battery on some models, or simply not exist at all – plug in the disk – and play!
This will come as a huge relief to the many who were frustrated by browsing catalogues of more than 2m tracks in every imaginable genre, downloading songs and albums whenever they wanted, sometimes even over the air, to hard disk-based devices that required no tiny, fiddly cards or trips to big superstores.
What a relief! Progress, eh?
I give it six months.