SanDisk, the world's second-best company at selling portable audio players, has just announced a new music format -- music on SD Cards -- intended to compete with Compact Discs. For the younger crowd, the Compact Disc was created in the mid-’80s to facilitate the technological leap from analog to digital recordings. Compact Discs (or CDs, as they were known) were sold in plastic receptacles called jewel cases, which also contained artwork, liner notes, and occasional bonus content (such as videos). As technology plodded along, the CD was rendered obsolete by digital distribution services such as Napster, Morpheus, AudioGalaxy, and OiNK.
It warrants a fair amount of suspicion why SanDisk would choose the third quarter of 2008 to release "slotMusic," a music format whose direct competitor has already begun their liquidation sale -- but stranger things have been successful (fuck you, Gwar). There are rumors circulating that SanDisk's fearless leader lost a bet to his infant daughter over the exact time of poopy, but there also exists the slim possibility that SanDisk actually believes there is a market for a new physical format in a landscape that has increasingly shown waning interest in physical media as a whole. Like, you know, cuz it's on a tiny SD Card instead of a big CD, and shit.
Regardless of baseless speculation, SanDisk will go ahead with slotMusic in the upcoming months, hoping to covet the lucrative granny-owning-blackberries demographic with an initial run of 30 hot new albums from Akon, Chris Brown, Ne-Yo, Rihanna, Robin Thicke, Weezer, Usher, Leona Lewis, and other major label-owned musicians. All the music sold in the slotMusic format, which has a 1GB capacity, will be 320 kbps DRM-free MP3s and will also include album artwork, liner notes, and occasional bonus content (such as videos). The cost is estimated between $7 and $15 and will be sold in major retail locations, such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart. They will probably be found next to the CDs.