Companies joining to push music on memory cards
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 24 September 2008, 17:11 IST
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Bangalore: Compact discs may soon be replaced by fingernail-sized MicroSD memory cards to store music tracks. The new format of cards which is likely to hit the market soon is called 'slotMusic' and it enables the user to store music in the MP3 format. Nielsen SoundScan, a tracker of music sales data, finds that most albums are still sold in a physical format. "About 449 million albums were sold on CDs in 2007, while 50 million were sold digitally, yet CDs are decreasingly popular. Albums sold on CD dropped almost 19 percent last year," finds the agency. SlotMusic is expected to be another physical revenue source for many of the music companies. It is more versatile than CDs, given the kinds of gadgets people carry around these days. People can access the slotMusic through multimedia players in cell phones. Albums in this format will come with a small USB dongle that lets buyers use them with computers too. "Particularly in this kind of economic climate, the idea of being able to use an electronic device you already own to enjoy music rather than going out and buying a dedicated player is pretty compelling," said Daniel Schreiber, Head, audio-video business unit at SanDisk. SanDisk is now working to develop SlotMusic technology. SlotMusic albums will be sold on 1 gigabyte microSD cards which enable the buyer to hold a full album and related content such as liner notes and cover art. Moreover, they will be able to use extra space on the cards to hold songs and photos from their own collection. The cards and dongles will come in boxes similar to current CD packaging. Schreiber said the price of slotMusic releases to be "in the ballpark" of current CD prices. The albums are expected to debut at multiple retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores in the U.S., and later in Europe. Rio Caraeff, Executive Vice President of Universal Music Group's eLabs digital music unit, said the label will initially release about 30 titles in the slotMusic format. The titles will include old and new albums. "I think we would certainly hope that the new format will take the place of CDs, but I don't think we are so tied to that," he added.

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