Stardate 20010824.0805 (On Screen): Here's a product concept that just doesn't look viable to me. But that's hardly unusual in the brave new world of digital music, where vendor hopes and dreams are routinely mistaken for potential customer excitement. This pipe dream involves making music available to digital phones which have MP3-player capability built in. A customer will call a certain number, work through a menu system, and purchase a piece of music. The piece of music will download into the phone and get stored into local memory, and then it can be played by the customer. The customer pays a fee for each piece of music which is downloaded that way. None of this is particularly difficult to implement.
But there's a difference between doing it and selling it. As a commercial product, it is competing with the ability of users at home to listen to their own CDs on normal stereo equipment, to rip their own CDs and load the resulting files into a portable MP3 player, and with the ability of users to download MP3's from the internet to use the same way. It also competes with normal commercial radio. There's only one thing this new service can do that the others cannot: if a person was away from home and suddenly had an urge to listen to a specific song and was willing to pay to get it, then this would be the only answer. (And pay a lot, too -- as much as $3 per track plus airtime for the download.) For every other purpose it's distinctly inferior. If the person just wants to listen to music and doesn't care what it is, a radio is cheaper and easier. If the person is at home, they have access to their CD collection. If the person plans ahead, they don't need this service. It's only good for impulse listens. How many people suddenly have an unquenchable need to listen to a specific piece of music? Who the heck wrote this business plan? (discuss)
