Consumers To Suffer As Real & SanDisk Create Another Closed System.
Portable player maker SanDisk has teamed up with RealNetworks to create a new player designed to work in tandem with Real’s Rhapsody subscription and download service. Ease of use is always an issue with consumer adoption and this is an attempt to compete with the hugely successful Apple iPod/iTunes combo. Microsoft is taking much the same approach with its new Zune combo.
But hidden inside these announcements is a dirty secret that may further alienate music consumers and encourage more free file sharing. Just like IPod/iTunes, Zune is designed to be a closed loop. Songs rented or purchased from Microsoft may only be playable on it’s player. And hidden inside the Rhapsody announcement is that while initially SanDisk players will use the widely used PlayForSure technology, Real will be migrating to it’s own closed software approach as well.
The stated goal of all of this may be ease of use, but the hidden demon is that purchased and rented music could be stuck within a single company’s system and consumer choice limited to those offered by that provider.
In an age when new technologies have caused consumers to expect what they want when they want it, how can music compete when new era distribution channels attempt to limit consumer choice?
The trouble is as the WSJ article said, so far the current non-iTunes music stores don’t work well with multiple mp3 players from multiple vendors. The only way Real can insure its service works correctly is to either develop its own format or for the industry to agree on a common format.
But at the moment there is very little incentive for Apple to agree to anything like that. Apple has to serve its shareholders interest first. I want that, I am a shareholder. I don’t care about the consumer, although I am a consumer myself. Why can’t the consumers withold their dollars from all these music stores and send a message instead.
Instead of these articles that complain about consumer suffering, why isn’t there some effort to organize consumers to not buy music from these services instead?
There is a universal format that consumers know and have adopted in large numbers, its MP3. Most players, Sony is a notable exception, work well with this format and all online store can sell tracks in this format.
This question of formats and interoperability seems like a moot point to me, since the end consumer has already decided. Even iTune’s power is dwarfed by the ubiquity of MP3 usage. People just aren’t renting music from these online shops for their players, as much as we’d like to think they are. If you divide the total number of hardware units sold by the total number of tracks sold for any given device/store combo it would be unrealistically small, something like 50 songs per device. I threw together a test spreadsheet here here
The numbers, as rough as they are in this sheet, just dont come close to adding up.