A New Medium

I read an article on Wired yesterday about SanDisk pushing to replace CDs with “SlotMusic,” basically an album, complete with artwork, on a MicroSD card. Five to 10 years ago, this might have caught on for a while. Let’s face it, CDs are crap. They are easy to scratch, and if you do, the whole thing is ruined. If this had come out in a cost-efficient way 10 years ago, we’d see slots built into most devices and maybe the success of iTunes would have been a bit different. We can’t really say for sure. The one thing I can say is this is a big mistake for another industry, the movie industry.

After a fight between Blu-ray and HDDVD we are seeing that neither are really winners. HDDVD is dead and Blu-ray sales are extremely low with no bright future in sight. What the SlotMusic’s failure is going to do, and it will fail because a physical medium for music is dead in a culture of iTunes and MP3s, is prevent other people from taking the chance to change other mediums. This SlotMusic card idea is perfect for movies. Movies don’t come with album art, so you’re not missing anything there. DVDs scratch just as easily as cds, so there’s another reason not to continue the disc medium, and with the increasing capacity of the cards, you’ll be able to put higher quality movies and extras on a single card. This is where DVDs should be heading. Unfortunately, I think the inevitable failure of SlotMusic will prevent that. Without widespread adoption, prices on cards will still be too high and you won’t see gadget manufacturers adding readers to TVs, DVD players (because you still need something to play your craptastic DVD collection), and other devices.