Technology in music series; (part 13) Hardware and software – on demand and on your hip (III)

Another piece of musical techno-geek wet-dream hardware announced in May that became vapourware by September was the Indrema. While on paper it would have had most of the music capacity of the SongBank, the Indrema would have added digital video – not unlike Panasonic’s then-new set-top digital video unit or TiVo – as well as video game capabilities, making it a virtual digital home entertainment center in a box.

“Personal TV is just beginning to take off,” Indrema marketing manager Yana Kushner said. “And you know MP3 is an enormous potential market. We are offering an entertainment system that does it all, and does it very well. The graphics subsystem is mind-blowing.”

Instead of tallying up holiday sales, by the spring of 2001 the company closed up shop, the victim, like so many technology companies at that time, of more burn than capital. As for the SongBank, a product with that name finally came out in 2005, but it hardly resembled what Griesman described. In the intervening half a decade, the digital music hardware marketplace had grown a little more conservative, but it still had all the stability of plutonium.

“The reality of the marketplace is, it moves awfully damn quick,” Griesman almost prognosticated.

We are arranging or trying to arrange a variety of different partnerships that will give us the flexibility to adapt to how the market unfolds. So, for example, should the market turn out to be subscription based, we’ll be able to support some sort of subscription service. Should it turn out to be a more traditional download basis – purchase albums, purchase tracks, whatever – we can do that. We’re working on streaming capabilities, as well. … Everything we’ve done comes from the consumer music lover’s perspective.

The automotive frontier presented the largest array of options for early adapters. Using a direct wire or an adapter, any of the portable devices could be used for car audio. In addition, by 2000 there were several hard-drive based MP3 players for the car, each costing around $1,000 and holding between 2,000 and 7,000 songs. These systems were basically removable hard drives installed in the trunk of a car that you could plug into your computer and transfer files. One of the early adapters in this market was Ted Cohen, who marvelled at the ability to have 20 gigabytes of music – larger than many people’s record collections – at his fingertips as he drove through L.A.

Automaker Ford and digital wireless phone technologist Qualcomm began working on a product called Wingcast, a way to allow the consumer to, among other things, access Internet music in his or her car, as well as integrate with the car’s onboard computer system. They expected it to be available in 2002 models and projected that it would become as common as the proverbial AM/FM/cassette package by 2004. Instead, by 2002, they had dissolved the partnership, and by 2005, GM was still the only auto manufacturer using telematics – as the system was called – albeit without the internet component, via its OnStar system.

In a move similar to the Qualcomm venture, though geared to pedestrians rather than automobiles, Korean LG Information and Communications, best known in the States for monitors, had put out an integrated cell phone and digital MP3 player. The Cyon MP3 allowed the consumer to download music right to flash memory on his or her phone, without having access to a computer. A similar phone finally came out in America late in 2005.

The bastard-stepchild status of the digital music files themselves slowed the hardware process to a crawl. Legal downloading of files remained in a state of hit-or-miss chaotic flux. The record companies were upset unto legal action with P2P users, and were none too happy about people using readily available consumer software to “rip” songs from CDs on to their hard drive as MP3 files (they regarded this as a prelude to P2P – more often than not, correctly).

This, software element, the MP3 file, was a true disruptive technology – everyone had MP3s and for the most part they were at everyone’s favourite price point: free. The brouhaha surrounding the very act of downloading had spread the word in a way that should be the envy of any marketing professional. Yet the hardware failed to be the disruptive technology it could have become, mostly because investors became risk averse during and after the dot-bomb. Until the music’s owners found some legal way of distributing their product over the internet, very few pieces of MP3-friendly hardware came to market, and those that did a lot of difficulty finding retail space, especially at the “big box” stores that sold both audio equipment and CDs.