Competition for the iPod
There’s been a slew of news recently that would have us believe that the iPod will no longer have the easy road it’s been on as the dominant MP3 player over the last few years. I have had an iPod for about a year now, and while I certainly enjoy it, I am in no way the religious adherent that some iPod fanatics are. In fact, I’ve never owned an Apple product OTHER than the iPod. However, I don’t see the iPod going away just yet. I do like all this additional competition, though, because theoretically it will only make the iPod better and cheaper. At the same time certain aspects of this competition can only cause chaos in the digital music world, which is not a good thing, really, for anyone..
Justin Blanton writes that “Obviously The Ipod is Dead” because they are refusing to “converge” with other devices like mobile phones, at least so far. He predicts that phones will eventually have hard drives that will enable them to play as much music as an iPod, or do even more. This may be true, but even now one can buy a “convergence device” like the Treo 600 for which one can buy 1GB memory cards capable of holding upwards of 300 songs each. Samsung will soon be coming out with 16GB cards that would hold more than the smaller 15GB iPod. Hard drives, or even built-in 4GB flash modules will, I’m sure, come to convergence devices in the not too distant future, especially as solid state memory prices continue to plummet. Will this kill the iPod? I doubt it. The problem is that such devices still carry a premium. A $700 phone is a lot more of an impediment – especially for a teen or 20-something – than a $300 iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Treo and use it for tons of things, but at the same time, I recognize that MP3 players like my iPod were made specifically with listening to audio in mind. Of course Apple’s design sense doesn’t hurt either. Apple has just one product in this category and they have worked continuously over the last few years to hone its functionality. On the other hand my Treo can play some formats that the iPod won’t, thankfully, and that brings me to the main thrust of this piece.
In the hunt to consolidate a market share in the digital music arena, Apple introduced their music download store, iTunes. Unfortunately, this store uses the AAC file format for copy prevention, and this format so far is not supported in almost any other player aside from the iPod. The iPod can also play the older and open MP3 format, but it cannot play a more advanced open format called Ogg Vorbis, nor can it play Microsoft’s Windows Media File (WMA) format, which is now supported on the vast majority of non-iPod players.
Two other big players in this arena have stepped up to the plate in an effort to compete with Apple. Microsoft has been pushing their WMA and has gotten it supported by many players (in addition to it’s PockePC devices and phones), and is not introducing its own music service to compete with iTunes. Sony, which has been making audio players much longer than Apple, may finally be thinking about adding MP3 capability to it’s players. Up until now, such devices would only use Sony’s proprietary Atrak format, a format also used by Sony’s new download service.
Sony owns a huge percentage of the popular music out there (not to mention the movies that could eventually make the jump to portability plus downloadability via sites like iTunes), and thus can dominate in this area especially if they finally offer MP3 (and possibly WMA) capability as may be the case. Sony is the king of proprietary formats, though, and the decision isn’t official.
In my thinking, unless something changes, we will eventually see a playing field where people just buy the device based on how well they work, and how programmable they are. Programmers (or hackers if you will) will (they already have in some cases) find ways to skirt both the copy protection mechanisms of these formats and the formats themselves so that they can be converted from one type of file to another, or at least make it so that they can be played on devices they weren’t meant to be played on.
In other words, the music industry still hasn’t learned its lesson from Napster. They should be banding together and offering music in the most attractive form. This means not only low prices, but also flexibility in how people can listen to it. By making things inconvenient and expensive, they are only driving the hackers to fill the justifiable desire on the part of consumers for a straightforward solution that allows them the maximum amount of choice (in terms of both devices and content) possible.
The iPod won’t die because it isn’t any less proprietary than the other devices paired with services out there. It may be relegated to second place, though, if Sony comes out with competing devices that also play downloadable movies. But unless all of these companies stop adhering to a battle-camp mentality where customers have to buy a Sony device in order to hear Sony content, or an Apple device to buy Apple content, etc., they will be fighting a losing battle. Consumers don’t care what company produced the content! They care only about the music (or movie). It’s inevitable that they will want to hear a substantial variety of music whose rights are owned by a variety of companies. Maybe in 20 or 30 years none of this will matter as more and more artists take the Indy route – especially if the trend continues of the content Giants not learning the lessons of history to adapt or hunker down and perish. But for the near future, anyway, this situation will just breed anger and a desire to defeat any restraint these companies want to put around the necks (ears?) of their customers.
Maybe Audible.com would be a good example for such companies. Audible.com provides downloadable audio books from a great number of publishers – either producing the recordings themselves or converting earlier books on tape or CD to their, yes, PROPRIETARY format. Yet, Audible has worked with many manufacturers since it’s inception in the late 90’s to make drivers for a huge number of devices. They didn’t just pick one brand and refuse to work with other companies because of some “strategic partnership.” And because of this one can listen to Audible.com content on Treo Cell phones and their competitor PocketPC phones, on Apple’s iPod, and on its competitor hard-drive based as well as flash memory MP3 players. Audible is now more successful than ever, at least if you view stock price as measure of success! True, Audible does not manufacture any devices themselves and this makes it easier for them to work with multiple manufacturers, whereas Apple offering iTunes for Sony devices would be creating more competition for their own iPod. But perhaps what this means is that companies should either sell the content that people want to hear or see, or they should make the devices, but not both. If they make both, there is just too much interest for them to create a firewall where they pair their device and content and make both incompatible with all other content and devices.