The new slotMusic initiative announced this week comes with far too few details for our liking and we suspect that it is not all that it appears, or perhaps that it is more than it appears. The claim is that it is a flash memory format for delivering music, and many critics have already said that it will fail, based purely on the fact that a 1 GB chip ‘ in this case a MicroSD, the most common format for handset flash memory these days ‘ is designed to carry albums, and people for the most part don’t want albums.
It is also being thought of a way for the big retailers to get back their dominance of music, so that Wal-Mart and Best Buy, and even Amazon, can once again Lord it over iTunes. It is lost on no-one that Apple iPods do not have a MicroSD slot, so that under their current design this means that this music is for handsets, and given the addition of a MicroSD USB sleeve in each chip, the PC.
The tracks are said to be DRM free, and that’s where we’re a little worried because MicroSD chips come with their own DRM built in, or to be more precise a form of copy protection. The press release which comes from SanDisk and which has been endorsed by the four big labels, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner Music, is very careful to talk about a lack of a DRM, and also very careful NOT to mention copy protection.
It said that users simply insert the slotMusic card into their microSD-enabled mobile phone or MP3 player to hear the music ‘ without passwords, downloading or digital-rights management interfering with their personal use.
So the announcement talks about the use case of taking your MicroSD card out of one device and simply putting it in another. But if this really was DRM-free why is it not a moveable file that is being sold, copied to your PC from a USB dongle which can also be copied to the handset and every other device? Because that would just promote piracy and would not get the buy-in from the record labels.
No the use case discussed is moving the chip from your handset to your PC to your MP3 player, and we would expect, as this initiative unfolds that what is actually going on is that there is a hidden decryption key on the Flash memory, and that there is an on chip file allocation table which does not have access to the location of the key. The key decrypts the music in order to play it and a determined pirate can capture the music as an analog and then digitize it, but if the file is copied to another device it remains encrypted and key does not go with it.
Otherwise it would be standard to copy the music from the chip onto your PC then download it into an iPod as an MP3 file.
Given the other inaccuracies of the announcement we think that it is likely we are right and there will be a further backlash when the real deal comes out. Because otherwise why would there need to be a new format at all? DRM Free MP3s can be bought (usually in high quality at 256 kbits per second) and can be copied onto any device, including an existing MicroSD chip. It’s how most students get their record collections onto their phones.
The new format is likely to be needed to make a version of MicroSD that is backwards compatible with all the players out there, but which still supports the existing copy protection built into MicroSD and likely to be implemented by the labels when they pre-load MicroSDs with music.
Also the music format for slotMusic is described as requiring 320 kilobytes per second, which is strange since most MP3 needs 128 kilobits per second or perhaps 256 kbits. So why does this format require 12 to 24 times the capacity or is that a mistake? It’s quite an important mistake because either the new slotMusic can hold 52 minutes of music only or it can hold closer to 400 minutes, which would most likely lead to new music formats.
For instance 400 minutes could mean about 100 minutes of music (a double album perhaps) plus cover art, video interviews with artists, some video performance, lyrics and other goodies. It could also mean, depending upon just how this is policed, that online stores might pre-configure 100s of tracks, not from one artist, but from several, in the same way that services sprang up to ‘fill up your iPod’ when those devices first came out. That all depends on just who has permission to create these pre-loaded MicroSD cards, or if the labels keep that ability entirely to themselves. If they try to do that, independent labels will immediately catch the trick, and come up with some lively new business models and spoil this format for the bug guys. If the format really is 320 KBps (rather than kbps) and it really is DRM free and content protection free ‘ the labels have entirely lost their marbles and will no longer be able to sustain their fight against piracy because it would be the highest quality of music out there totally unprotected.
So we suspect that this announcement itself is a spoiler, a holding action against the continued success and growth of online services, specifically iTunes, and that when these services come out, there will only be one thing that might save them, and that’s pricing. At present the music is described as an ‘album’ which will cost around $15, with just 29 available on day one, in time for the holiday season.
That pricing is virtually the same as online music, which is the same as physical music, so there is no hint that there will be a price advantage over other formats ‘ which there will need to be to make this at all attractive.
The launch is initially in the US with Europe to follow and SanDisk the inventor of MicroSD controller technology is leading the technology development of the slotMusic format.
If this takes off we will have a new generation of physical music formats that are highly losable, which need whole new accessories (like somewhere to keep them all) and which have no price advantage. Also the 1GB version would be out of date in about 3 months at the rate at which Flash memory prices are falling, and in just a year, the amount of data will at least quadruple on a MicroSD card or whatever takes its place.