Two Digital Music Player announcements in the last week point the way to features that will have long-term impact on the way people use these portable devices. Competing with Apple's iPod on the price/convenience/design equation has been a hard row to hoe. So an alternative is to compete on significant new benefits. The kind of benefits we can expect, based on the announcements, are: more social interaction, so you can communicate and share through the device; and a more dynamic collection of tracks, personalised to your preferences.
People are used to two ways of listening: the radio offers near-zero control of what you hear (though you can always change channels), the CD player offers near-total control of what you hear. Personalised radio services like Pandora, Last.fm and Yahoo's LAUNCHcast are starting to get people used to a more hybrid experience — radio you can tune to your tastes. But these have always been shackled to your computer.
New players running Rhapsody's DNA platform, of which the first is the Sansa e200 (pictured), promise to bring this experience to your pocket. They arrive with 32 hours of music pre-loaded (like a radio station playlist), and can then change the music based on what you like:
The players also include unique capabilities, such as automatically updating with new music based on a consumer's personal tastes and historical music preferences. "Rhapsody DNA is an amazing innovation that puts the celestial jukebox into the consumer's pocket," said Rob Glaser, chairman and CEO, RealNetworks. (from press release, via paidContent.org)Meanwhile the Microsoft Zune holds out the prospect of using wi-fi to share your favourite music with your friends. They only get to hear each track three times or for three days (whichever expires sooner), but is something better than nothing? (As a sidenote, it appears that this restriction on sharing will contravene the licence for music released under Creative Commons share-alike terms [Update, 20 September, there now seems to be some doubt about this charge]).
Don't expect either of these new developments to take off immediately. Shifting listening habits takes time. Sansa owners may resist if they find, let's say, that one of their rarely-played tracks has been 'swapped out' from the player's hard disk and replaced by a track from an automated recommendation.
Then there is the fact that both the Sansa and Zune players come with their own new, proprietary Digital Rights Management. This means that, instead of it becoming easier to swap digital music between different players, it is getting harder. This must surely work against adoption of the new players, since potential buyers will be concerned that, if the new platform doesn't take off, they could be left after a few years with loads of music tracks that they can only hear on players that are being phased out.
But in the long term, these developments will make portable players more useful and enjoyable for discovering new music. A couple of years ago, some people were saying that iPods would spell the end of radio. I mocked them then, because I thought people were still interested in new music — and, anecodotally, several friends have told me since how they are "bored with all the music on my iPod". Whether these new developments gain traction in the Rhapsody and Microsoft incarnations, or whether they get absorbed into future generations of iPods, they will make listening to music on portable players more refreshing.
Eliot Van Buskirk's Music store in your pocket article is also worth reading on closely-related developments.
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