> From: Nick May <nick@kyushu.com>
>
> So yes, people will pay as long as the cost is fairly low. Whether they
> will pay to listen on their keitai is a different matter - I am far more
> interested in getting speech radio from across the net than some silly pop
> song...
I think that there's a reasonably good chance that keitai will
eventually replace personal stereos the same way that they are already
replacing digital cameras. At that point you can be passing by a poster
for Chemistry's new single, photograph the bar code on the poster to
bring it up on your keitai's web browser, download it, and listen to it,
and get charged through the standard billing mechanisms.
The phone-as-MP3-player thing has been tried once by Sony, but didn't
meet with much success. Why was it not successful, and why haven't we
seen something new that is successful? Here are some of the reasons.
The first is memory capacity: people just aren't all that interested in
something that holds only a half hour of music and takes five minutes
to load. Removable memory cards don't help, because they're hideously
expensive. For the same price as your standard MP-3 walkman, I can buy
an MD player, store more than 2.5 hours of music on a single 50 yen
MD, and remove one MD and insert another in seconds. When I travel, I
carry my portable MD player and eight or so MDs with me, giving me 20
hours of music in my pocket for under 20,000 yen. No memory based system
has yet gotten down to that price level. But once we've got to the
point where we've got players with at least a gigabyte of storage for
less than 20,000 yen, they can compete with non-memory based systems.
(Probably the way this will happen will be that the hard drive systems,
which currently provide 10-40 GB of storage, will come down in size and
price.)
The second is that the extra functionality can't increase, by much,
the size or weight of the keitai. One of the reasons that cameras are
so successful is that it costs you little to nothing, both in terms of
price and size/weight, to have a camera in your phone, so even if you're
not going to use it much, it's not a problem to have one.
The third is that, at least for Japan, we need a way of getting the
music on to the device that doesn't involve a computer. Compared to the
U.S., generally fewer people here own computers, and even those that do
seem a bit resistant to having to use a computer to get the music on
to or off of their device. Direct download via the phone's web browser
would be much more popular.
> From: Giovanni Bertani <giovanni.bertani@exsense.com>
>
> Possibly. They belong to "Generation Theft" (Music has ALWAYS been free,
> in their experience).
I don't know about that. There have always been free forms of music out
there (making MDs and, before that cassette tapes), and yet people still
have continued to buy music.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Mon Apr 28 07:20:36 2003