Sandisk to sell music on SD Cards

SanDisk has unveiled plans to sell albums on SD cards.  The manufacturer reckons that, instead of picking up a CD in a record store, consumers will be attracted to the idea of buying a tiny slotMusic chip for their cellphone or PDA.

The cards should be available soon in the USA, and from 2009 in Europe, and will fortunately be DRM-free.  The target audience is apparently mobile phone owners, who will the advantage of not having to copy an album from a computer onto a portable device.

An agreement has been signed with the 'Big Four' record labels, Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner to allow access to their content using this platform.

Content

SanDisk plan to offer 1 GB cards, which will mostly be filled with MP3s of the album in question encoded at 320 kbit/s, artwork, and in, some cases, videos. 

The user will be free to use the rest of the space on the card.

Physical Media

It's not the first time that the big labels have made music available on memory cards. 

Albums released on USB keys did not really take off, and it wasn't the paltry number of digital MP3 players that featured pre-loaded tracks that made this such a successful market.
The problem for the labels, though, is that CDs just simply aren't selling any more.  The legal download market is growing, but there are still plenty of unanswered questions around DRM and the fixed pricing of tracks, no matter how popular they are. 

slotMusic is entering a very complex market, and one where the overwhelming trend has recently been away from physical media. 

Sure, the"High Quality, DRM-Free MP3 Music on microSD Cards" trumpeted by SanDisk sounds great, but is anybody actually going to want to carry around memory cards to listen to music?