The State of Downloadable Music & Storage

Hardware, software, content owners and service providers are saying what Estelle Reiner (mother of Rob Reiner) said after watching Meg Ryan explain intimate relationships in When Harry Met Sally… "I'll have what she's having."

According to a recent report there are more than 75 different MP3 players available… and more on the way. It simply proves how well Jobs has built the image for iPod and iTunes.

While Apple still has the biggest chunk of sales, everyone is bent on becoming their replacement in a rapidly growing market.

But buying download music shouldn't be any more difficult than going to the grocery store. The problem is that the iTunes music Store, MSN Music, Napster, Real's Music Store, Rhapsody, Sony Connect, Yahoo Music, Amazon and the rest have different protocols and don't sell the same bundle of bits. They have to deal with the licensing organizations to have the right inventory and after all of that your store(s) may not have the artist, album or song you want.

Whether your "service" lets you buy it once or rent by the month, they each have their pros and cons. And the number of subscribers in both camps is almost the same. Then too there is always the manufacturers' bigger-is-better sales proposition giving you more capacity in a smaller package.

What drives the hardware and service frenzy are the facts (gathered from IDC, Forrester, Informa, Gartner) that:

• 50% of dig music player owners have less than 100 songs on them

• 1000 songs are enough for 90% of music lovers

• 13 bln songs available on peer-to-peer nets

• 16% of online adults buy 99c tracks, 17% choose subscription

• 46.4 mln digital music players were sold in 2004, 132 mln will be sold in 2009

• iTunes sold its 570,000,000th digital song in Q3, '05

• Apple sold over 21 mln iPods in Q3, '05

• Brits bought 5.26 mln music tracks in Q1 '05 and 2.5 mln in the last 2 months

• By 2007, 1/3 of music will be sold online

• Music subscription services will generate $890 mln in 2009

• Online music market will reach $1 bln this year, $4.4 bln in 2008

You would think the music industry would be excited about the download channel but it is still bent on suing its customers into submission. The RIAA renewed its music lawsuit efforts across the country and has racked up more than 14,000 suits since Sept 2003. The suits have dried up a number of online sources and have reduced traffic at others. Kaaza user numbers are down dramatically as are those of eDonkey.

Storing It All
"We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age," Tony Robbins.

Folks who have MP3 players or digital cameras have it made. A GB of flash memory can store 250 songs or 1000 4Mpixel photos. If they have one of the new PMPs (portable media players) they can store 15 hours of MPEG-4 or 4.8 hours of DVD video.

For these types of units flash will probably be sufficient. They are extremely rugged, are shock resistant and require very little power. In addition, the capacity is doubling annually, prices are dropping 40 percent every year and they already give low capacity 0.85-inch HDs a serious price/performance run for their money.

But we aren't talking ordinary people here. We're talking the always-on, always-connected society! InfoTrend's Kristy Holch sees the camera/camcorder market growing steadily as video podcasting takes off while the camphone will quickly evolve into a gotta have infotainment tool that is an individual's constant companion. The morphed phone will take its place next to the laptop as an always with you work, communications, entertainment device.

The drive industry has never shaken it's Al Shugart, Finis Connor heritage… they eat their young!!!

The 14-inch drives begot the 12-inch begot the 8-inch begot the 5.25-inch begot the 3.5-inch begot 2.5-inch begot the 1.8-inch begot the 1-inch begot the 0.85-inch. With each new member of the family they got faster, higher in capacity, tougher (not invulnerable) and cheaper.

While chips are eating into the 0.85-inch product applications, the drive manufacturers are far from worried about their livelihood. What they are doing is redefining where hard drives fit.

People are grabbing and packratting everything - videos, photos, music, emails, web data, ??? -- and that spells big storage that right now only the hard drive can provide. Much to the delight of drive manufacturers like Seagate, Maxtor, WD, Hitachi and Toshiba the future looks bright… not hugely profitable but bright.

These firms develop new, higher capacity HDs in each of the form factor categories even before the latest has hit the streets. Just when they looked like they were running out of writing space they found a new mantra…perpendicular recording.

They scour the backstreets of all of the usual target cities pushing mobile everything. While the 3.5-inch drives is the commodity market, the 2.5-inch and sub-2.5 markets will be their future. Especially with the new intelligent shock protection that kicks in when the device falls just a few inches.

To paraphrase Field of Dreams… "If you build it, they will fill it."