Buy Your Digital Music From A Vending Machine
The future of the music industry has arrived: the MP3 vending machine. MOD Systems has released its Download2Go digital music kiosks in Quick Chek convenience stores. Shoppers can now grab a quick bite to eat and a new album while they're browsing around. With these machines, all the user has to do is tap the screen, find a song, insert their memory stick, and swipe their credit card. Then the tunes download instantly.
At first it's easy to scoff at this idea, but not everyone can afford those expensive data plans. The kiosks are going live in 10 locations across its New York and New Jersey convenience stores to start. Imaginably, they'll be rolled out to airports and subways soon too. Places where users get stuck or have less than desirable web connections. Flight cancelled? Buy some music. Take a look:
(via Rolling Stone)
That’s an article about a music downloading service, yet the picture shows a bunch of movies.
I see 18 Again, Amadeus, 2010 … I don’t see any albums, though.
This is, of course, the worst idea I’ve seen in years.
I took the image from their site. They're the same machine in principle.
I’m sure you did, but I find it odd that they would use a screen of movie cases to announce a music service. It’s just indicative of the amount of thought that went into this.
If you’re making a portable downloading service that can’t put the songs directly onto an iPhone or iPod (which this can’t), you’re not building a sustainable business model.
This is a great idea, but they need to add one more option: getting it on CD. The truth is there is a lot of people who are not used to using computers for music; yet CDs are disappearing from retail space either completely or with greatly reduced selection. Part of the reason why less music is being sold is that the impulse buy has been eliminated. But instead of having a limited number of factory made CDs, they should have a huge choice of music which can be burned onto a CD right in the vending machine. I know people think it’s absurd, but it could work like RedBox does. Put it in the grocery store. Market it to over 40 year olds. Think Susan Boyle, Sade & Josh Groban fans. Not to mention country fans.
While this may have been a good idea a few years ago, I don’t think I would classify this as the future of the music industry. I do agree with your point that not everyone can afford the expensive data plans, personally I don’t even have one yet. However I don’t think there’s any arguing with the fact the the future of music is in streaming through mobile devices or even computers still. Statistics show that streaming activity has finally reached the same level as digital downloads and is continually gaining numbers everyday. Google and Apple both have music streaming services planned to launch very soon. This may be useful for those people without smart phones and data plans, but it will become obsolete in a very short amount of time.
I’d rather have a CD-R vending machine. Now that would really be something: good sound quality!