p2pnet - rss feed: Mp3 music players half empty
p2p news / p2pnet: Apple has built its business largely on the fact its marketeers have been able to convince the faithful, who are willing to spend $1 and more on formulaic, low fidelity music tracks from the Big Four record labels, that they need more of what they already have too much of. And No. It isn’t money. It’s storage capacity.
“The average user fills only 58 per cent of their music player, leaving the average player with more than 4GB of free space,” says IT Week.
And you can further bet only a relative handful of the songs stored actually get listened to on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, “Two thirds of stored music is ripped from CDs, and just 17 per cent is downloaded,” says the story, quoting from an ICM Research survey. “Of the 1,000 people questioned only six per cent admitted to downloading music illegally and one in 10 had copied music from friends,”
It was commissioned by Napster whose Leanne Sharman says, “With Christmas around the corner and retailers predicting a bumper year for sales of MP3 players, these statistics show that filling up and using an MP3 player is obviously not as quick and easy as people expect. The problem is that ripping CDs is time consuming.”
The implication is Napster will solve the problem, and it indeed has the potential to fix perceived difficulties with storage —- but only because it tries to get people to rent the music for a monthly fee and when they stop paying for whatever reason, their carefully collected libraries vanish. Literally. And forever.
Read:-
IT Week - Most MP3 players ‘barely half full’, December 15, 2005
December 16th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
This is why I got a flash based player that uses SD cards. The 512Mb cards are down to about $20. I can bring a couple extra cards if half a gig of tunes is not enough. No moving parts. 30 hour battery life from a USER REPLACEABLE AA battery (what a concept!). If I loose or smash the thing it cost me tens of dollars instead of hundreds.
P.S. I will not under any circumstances download or play DRM infected music files on my computer or portable. Who in their right mind would KNOWINGLY put malicious software on their system?
December 16th, 2005 at 5:44 pm
sounds like most american’sbrains only half full!
December 16th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
You need a little extra space on your mp3 player. It’s not like you are going to full it once and that’s it. You need room to constantly add and change what you’ve got.
Most of the large capacity models do so much more than play music nowadays. You will also need extra space for pictures and video. Video, in particular, is something that will constantly be swapped onto and off of people’s mp3 players. They also tend to be much larger files.
They may as well to a study of how full most people keep their computer hard drives. I’d be willing to bet that the percentage would be similar.
I have over 120GB of mp3 files and I tend to keep my mp3 player filled to capacity. Sure I don’t listed to every song with frequency, but I never know what i will be in the mood for and I’d just as soon have plenty of choice.
December 16th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
A new study says most houses and apartments are only half full. Expect a boom in furniture sales.
December 17th, 2005 at 6:40 am
You’ve hit the nail on the head, mate. Of course people are going to want to keep some free space on whatever player they’re using. When it comes to computer hard drives, unless you’re a file-hoarder, who hardly ever deletes anything, most people are bound to have several gigabytes free on a 50GB partition. You know, just in case they need somewhere to put something.
December 17th, 2005 at 6:49 am
Quote: I will not under any circumstances download or play DRM infected music files on my computer or portable. Who in their right mind would KNOWINGLY put malicious software on their system?
An idiot is who would do such a thing.
As for DRM, somebody should come up with a program which can strip out DRM code from all known formats the instant a DRM-infected file shows up on the computer.
If we have antivirus and antispyware programs, why don’t we have anti-DRM programs as well? DRM is just as much a virus as anything that Norton Antivirus would detect. It is also spyware. I don’t want any of my personal information going to any big business. Someone needs to include scanning and removal routines for DRM into antivirus and anti-spyware software. Well, either that, or write a standalone program that does the job.
December 17th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Oh my God! You are a terrorist!
120 GB of mp3? That would be about 30,000 songs.
RIAA would like to talk to you.
At $150,000 per song that would be 4.5 billion dollars they want.
Maybe also the FBI wants to talk to you. After all you have cost the economy about 100,000 jobs, of mostly the poor artists and record company investors that RIAA defends with all their heart.
July 14th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Hello, nice post.