Getting Creative - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Industry Standard, The, Jan 1, 2001 by Jimmy Guterman

An image of a cassette and crossbones made the point if the words below it didn't: "Home taping is killing music."

Turn the time machine back to the late 1970s, before MP3 or Napster, even before the personal computer. That's when the recording industry insisted in its advertising that the act of taping for your friends could destroy all we know. A generation and many billions of dollars of revenue later, the industry continues to make a similar argument, often with success: That's why no one you know owns a DAT.

The Net, of course, is bigger than any of the previous threats to the recording industry, both real and imagined, so it's no surprise that the industry's high-profile attempts to quash music file-swapping over the Net have been accompanied by equally high-profile attempts to get in on the game. Bertelsmann's deal with Napster is only the beginning. And with companies like Sony that make both hardware and software in the recording-industry cabal, the attempts will undoubtedly come from both sides.

The gadget that should accelerate the move is Creative's Nomad Jukebox, an MP3 player the size of a portable CD player that can store roughly 150 CDs' worth of music. It shouldn't raise the industry's ire the way Napster did because it's purely for personal use; unlike Napster, it doesn't make your CD collection widely available to all comers. But the Nomad Jukebox and its descendants might have an even more fundamental impact on the music business.

Jeremy Schwartz, in a recent Forrester Research report, suggests record companies should consider cutting deals with Creative to get their music on a Nomad Jukebox. Although Schwartz claims the player "will accelerate the music industry's collapse of control," he recommends that traditional record companies "use the Jukebox as a music distribution mechanism." This won't work for the new recordings that are the focus of the industry's marketing muscle. Companies are unlikely to pay Creative to give away music they want to sell, and trends change so quickly that a Jukebox loaded with new material when it's manufactured in December will be hopelessly out of date when someone buys it in March. In the end, the only jukebox that matters for MP3 fans is the jukebox they build themselves.

But record companies can reach their audience by hiding in MP3 players. One can imagine that a genre- or label-specific Nomad Jukebox would appeal to people who don't have the time or patience to encode and transfer their 150 or so favorite rockabilly or Stax CDs (Schwartz suggests a "Blue Note Bop-Era Jukebox" as an example). Similarly, a high-end gift version of a book like The Best Rock 'n' Roll Albums of All Time could come with those 100 CDs burned into a customized Nomad Jukebox.

As record companies try to figure out how they can build businesses on file-swapping services, they need to think more about what people will use to listen to those swapped files. No one I know wants to center his own music-listening habits around a computer. Portable programmable digital-music players of all kinds will proliferate, from the modest SoundsGood Visor add-on to CD-size units that will emerge over the next year to make the Nomad Jukebox's 6MB hard disk seem scrawny. And such early generation gadgets are begging to be installed as pricey options into the dashboards of the absurd high-end cars that early adopters favor.

Of the many scenarios that could work, one seems particularly appetizing for both record companies and customers. Assuming the record companies agree on a subscription service (inevitable, as the cable modems that more and more people use to go online will make cable-channel business models seem more appropriate), a subscriber could plug in his or her Nomad Jukebox (or compatible unit), indicate what to fill it with, go to sleep and the next morning have 1,500 songs waiting. The bandwidth for that exists.

Or subscriptions could be narrower: If you re a Beastie Boys fan, you could subscribe to a service that automatically sends you a new Beastie Boys track when it is available. Services like this will make music easier to acquire, buy and listen to. It would open a new distribution medium for an industry that needs one. Maybe this time, home taping can help save the music industry.