The biggest sellers will be for groups popular with teenage girls. How many albums have been released in that format?

The last time we had a slot-loading type music player, it was called 8-Track.

I'm not interested in one, but it's perfect for the tween market. It's just a really simple delivery system for mp3s. You buy them in the store on a little card and put them in your little player. Much easier for kids to use than itunes, it's cheap, and there's something physical involved.

" The last time we had a slot-loading type music player, it was called 8-Track"

Errrmmm ... MiniDisc?

Actually, I like this idea if it's done in the right way - I can buy physical media, hopefully with a high enough bitrate, FLAC or other lossless format, memory's cheap, put all of them on...something permanent, compact and re-usable.

Strange but we still like to hold on to something physical..oooh errr

The CD is already obsolete, and while it can be argued that the sale of music and movies is gravitating to the virtual world, we have a few years to go before downloading of entertainment becomes accessible and pervasive enough to eliminate the need for a physical system of transferring this type of data. Also, don't forget that physical systems still can deliver a bit higher level of intellectual property protection than data.

Look at how difficult it is to transfer music from one ipod to another, or to load music from one home computer to another. Yes Apple has great hardware, but really the software is clunky and irritating. Not becuase Apple can't write quality software, but rather, because it is built around the idea of IP protection instead of being totally devoted to the consumer experience.

Result, phisical conveyance of data will stay around a lot longer than it should. And, a great deal of buying is impulsive. So, as long as people visit physical locations, they will buy physical music.

As traditional music stores continue to disappear, other retailer will seek ways to continue to serve the physical niche and have a desire to use less square footage to make physical selection of music available at grocery stores, convenience stores, starbucks, etc. They key evolution will be packaging and a way of conveniently organizing a few dozen of these cards into some type of wallet.

Maybe this won't be the hit the Sandisk hopes it will be but it does have it's place in the market and a certain type of utility.

I really am. I thought this one was a real non-starter. Just goes to show, nowt as strange as folk.

CDs are horrible, bulky, fragile, require huge expensive players and tons of power. Let this be the future of music, and with luck, slotMovie will come out in the future and crush dvds and blu-ray too.

Movies in the same format. With SD capacities being what they are, we could drop the DVDs and BRDs and move to nice, non-movable, non-*scratchable* read-only SDs.

Um. If she's a Good Girl Gone Bad, wouldn't it be SlutMusic ?

CD's are still a cheap way to deliver a higher quality product; indeed the whole MP3 market is based on selling us second-rate content at first-rate prices and mostly with 18th century rights restrictions attached. So, I'm still not interested except in the direst cases of "not available on CD".

End of the cd?

Yes sales have fallen, to a mere $20bn a year.

I'm sure many companies would love an obsolete systme shifting $20bn a year!!!

"CDs are horrible, bulky, fragile, require huge expensive players and tons of power"

Eh?

You can buy a cd player for under a tenner and comsume ooo about 1 or 2 watts of power!

I have cd's that are over 20 years old. Wonder if SD still will be playable in 20 years? Me thinks not somehow.

I do like the idea of these cards, but unlike Vinyl and Cd, these are short lifespan products.

...the millions of CD's that are out there already, the technology will struggle to expand.

I have a PS3, and I am now buying films on Blu-Ray. Only new ones, though, as I don't see the point in buying films I already own on DVD because they will work perfectly well in my PS3, as they will in any other Blu-Ray player. Same with my CD's, that also work in my car stereo and billions of other CD, DVD and Blu-Ray (oh, and HD-DVD of course) players around the globe.

SD will quickly find itself limited to the mobile market, and the mobile market will quickly realise that pissing around with teeny little SD cards to change from one album to another when a normal MP3 player will let you do it at the click of a button isn't worth the hassle. SD cards slots on MP3 players? Great idea. One album per SD? Crap idea.

You can buy a CD player but look how huge it is compared to say, an ipod shuffle. It has less capacity, it has moving parts and skips if you are jogging (unless you up the power consumption), and you have to carry tons of CDs around. Chances are the songs you want to listen to are not even on the same CD!

I'm not talking about CDs failing tomorrow, but I hope they go the way the cassette tape has gone and that this is the start of it.

SD cards will be playable forever because, SD cards are all backwards compatible with each generation, SD card readers cost barely anything, and any device can be made to read them. Want stuff to be able to read CDs? You have to have a hugeeeee CD player attached to it! Impractical for most purposes.

How many people actually have portable CD players anymore? I'd wager barely anyone. It seems pointless to buy a CD then have to use a PC to get it onto your PC or MP3 player. Why not cut out the middle man? Do CDs serve any other purpose than to be a medium of transport?

As for sound quality, no-one cares. Really. They don't care. I'd wager your average guy including you couldn't tell the difference between a CD and an MP3 at 192kbps, never mind the 300+ these SD cards are offering. And I'd wager the average guy couldn't give a damn either. The old MP3 being lower quality argument is really annoying because the difference is negligible.

People won't buy one album per SD card yet they will buy one album per CD? Baffling.

They're effectively a form of RAID, non?

Gotta have backups.

Before you all jump on that one. I meant that CDs are useful for backups from the point of view of em being independent of one another. You lose one CD, you haven't lost your whole collection.

Coz I'm sitting here looking at all my minidisk players which are essentially redundant aside from guitar / live recording that is.

I'd love an 8-track too.

is a shame that they only release SlotMedia as 320Kbps MP3 and not lossless quality material... i still don't see why you'd want to buy something with less quality... why not just but the CD, then you have it in true 1141kpbs and can make it lossy if you want... funny things is, 1GB SlotMedia could fit the whole album on in lossless format, there's enough space on the thing.

with all the hype about HDTV and High Def this and High Def that, it's sad that music seems to be going the other way.