Technology in music series; (part 12) Hardware and software – on demand and on your hip (II)

Unfortunately, while downloadable digital music had broken through the underground like spring crocuses, via the peer-to-peer services on the one hand and Liquid Audio and MCY and their ilk on the other, the hardware that would take digitally downloaded music off the computer and onto the living room (and the car) stereo remained buried.

Very few mainstream audio merchants carried the Brujo, and you could only use it for digital files if you had a CD burner on your computer – still a fairly expensive option in 2000, rather than the standard equipment it has become. All of the products for playing digital files available in America required a computer at some point in the process. In other words, they might allow the music to be taken away from the computer, but they didn’t necessarily get music away from the computer yet.

While the word “music” doesn’t even appear in the index to his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen might as well have been writing the book for the emerging digital music business; digital music files and players exemplify what he calls a “disruptive technology.” The example he cites is the hard-drive industry and the developments that allowed the drives to get smaller yet have more available disc space. Each time this kind of change occurred, the company that brought on the change challenged the market leaders and ultimately toppled them.

“Disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge,” Christensen wrote, “not a technological one.” Unless you can:

• Identify potential customers

• Convince those potential customers that they need the technology

• Find a price point that works

Then the gear is destined for the great technological scrap heap. On a consumer level, entertainment technology develops in a pretty standard curve, particularly hardware. When a new component or format comes out, initially only well-to-do gadgeteers can even touch it. Eventually, depending on marketing and how well the product does among the first wave, early-adapter gadget buyers, the price starts to come down and the item becomes mainstream; think of DVD in the mid-1990s. Or else it doesn’t sell and vanishes; think DAT or digital compact cassettes before that.

“You’ll always have a certain amount of – I don’t want to call them elitists, but people who are on the cutting edge of new technology,” Russ Solomon, head of Tower Records, mused. “A lot of brand-new electronic machinery gets bought for that reason. It’s just new. People buy it.  That’s their hobby. But that doesn’t create a mass market. They actually sold an awful lot of DAT machines. I’ve got one. I never use it, but I’ve got it.”

Of course, for this curve to even have a chance to develop, the product has to come to market. Take the aforementioned SongBank. In June 2000, its creators announced their revolutionary system that would allow you to make compressed digital copies of your own CDs. The unit also would come with a modem and network connection to allow you to eliminate the computer from the process, downloading music directly from the web to your stereo.

In all, you could create a possible database of 7,000 songs on a SongBank, almost 500 CDs’ worth of music, which would blow the capacity of CD carousels – up to that point the only way of getting even close to that much music onto your stereo – out of the water, especially when you consider that you wouldn’t have put an entire CD on the system, only those songs you wanted.

By August 2000, however, the company had begun to have second thoughts. Dwight Griesman, the head of marketing for Lydstrom, the parent company of the SongBank, explained:

Rather than rush to market with a product that was good but perhaps not outstanding for the consumer state, we decided to finish, if you will, and integrate other improvements and technology. While we’re doing that, we’re also working with consumer electronic manufacturers in hopes that we can compress some of this traditional product lifecycle, so that perhaps it won’t be two to three years before some of these products come to market at reasonable price points.