inputs/outputs

Today, I bought my first physical CD in two years.  The record that made me break my streak of only buying digital music is Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile’s new album of original compositions.  It’s as lovely as I expected.  I forgot how it feels to buy a physical CD; unwrapping it, cracking the case for the first time, the coverart, the liner notes.

Unfortunately, it’s been imported into iTunes and will soon go on the iPod, which means the CD will be tossed somewhere in my room never to be seen again.  Even romantics like me would prefer a digital download, I guess.

Gadget makers used to have one goal with the devices they produced.  A cell phone made calls, a PDA helped you organize, a Discman played discs.

The current trend is to create devices that do it all, but specialize in a certain area at the same time.  For instance, the Blackberry is a PDA that also makes calls/takes photos, a cellphone makes calls but will also act as a clock/watch.  The iPod is an MP3 device but it will play your movies and you can also do some gaming.  These devices do well at their main function, but tend to skimp over the other stuff.  Cell phones make calls but suffer from a poor interface.  iPods play MP3s but I’ve never seen anyone use them to play games.  Instead of focusing on adding a bunch of pointless accessories, why not make hidden features?

High end watches can be sold for an absurd amount of money.  The watch performs one function, and so the rest of what it “does” is up to the owner.  The connection to the brand, the prestige, the story that the consumer tells themself, etc.  These are the hidden features.

Hidden features aren’t spelled out in the manual.  Not every user is affected by them.  The iPhone has a bunch of hidden features, all the way from the way it looks sitting on your hip, to the way it makes you feel like a futuristic businessman when you’re touching icons and watching the cool animations.  The rush you get from pushing the accelerator on a BMW, that’s a hidden feature.

For devices that do one thing really well, and do a mediocre job on the other stuff, hidden features might be a good thing to look into.

Amazon has three things to offer us as they’re pushing their new alternative to the iTunes Store.

1. Better quality. Better bitrate, better tools, VBR. If you know anything about audio quality, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear this huge step forward from the 128kbps bitrate on the iTunes store. Problem is, most iTunes users I know don’t know that their music is encoded at such a low rate, and probably can’t tell. When no problem exists, there’s no problem to solve.

2. No DRM. Songs actually belong to you. This is great if you want to download the song to a non-iPod, or if you want to send them to a friend.

3. Cheaper. This is the one most consumers will understand. The songs are 10 cents cheaper than their DRM counter parts on iTunes, and 40 cents cheaper than the iTunes non-DRM files.

The problem seems to be that, with any new alternative, there needs to be a perceived problem with the current one in order for it to be de-throned by the new one. So, a better quality MP3 will not be enough to switch users from iTunes to Amazon. What about price and no DRM? Maybe.

Amazon doesn’t offer any type of management system for the downloads. There’s an application that acts as a downloader, but it doesn’t actually play the files. People are still going to use iTunes as their player, which means that the 10 cent discount and the DRM-free files come at a cost of having to run a separate program, with a separate user account. It means that the files that are downloaded need to imported into the iTunes library (as opposed to automatically appearing under “Purchased”). It means that the user actually has to deal with the physical file, rather than a line in the iTunes browser (many users don’t see the link between physical files and the the iTunes line item).

So I guess it all depends on how important non-DRM files and 10 cents off matter to the legal music downloaders. I know that I’m going to turn to Amazon for my downloading, but my dad will probably stick to what he knows, and to what interfaces with his iPod the easiest.

Just as a sidenote, I wish there existed a program for Windows that could manage any MP3 playing device that was plugged in.