Digital Noise: Music and Tech

I'll readily admit that I'm not in the target audience for the new SlotRadio MP3 player from SanDisk, which became available last week.

The $99 device comes with a microSD card containing 1,000 songs, selected by Billboard editors from top-charting radio hits of the last 40 years or so, arranged in seven playlists--rock, country, hip-hop, and four others.

You can't edit or rearrange the playlists, you can't move the songs to your computer or any other device, and the only way to get new songs is by buying new 1,000-song cards for $39.99 apiece.

For a music control freak like me--I used to be the jerk at parties who'd secretly rifle through the host's CD collection looking for something I liked more than what was playing--turning my audio programming over to somebody else isn't easy.

There's a wee tiny rock band in there, and they're playing my favorite Steely Dan song.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

But I got a chance to play with the SlotRadio today, and there's something refreshing about its simplicity. I took it out of the box while sitting on the bus and was listening to music in less than 30 seconds.

There's no software to install, no USB cable to plug in, no CDs to rip, and no need for the instruction booklet. It's an MP3 player for people who don't know what MP3s are--and don't really care--but just want to rock out to some good tunes without carrying their entire CD collection around in their car.

While I agree with CNET's Jasmine France that the sound quality is only mediocre, the bigger problem is the mainstream, middle-of-the-road selections chosen by Billboard.

SanDisk had to start somewhere, and Billboard is one of the biggest names in the biz, but each playlist sounded like a heavily audience-tested radio station programmed by some anonymous machine in a building in New York. That is fine...but if I wanted the risk-averse sensation of radio, I'd just turn on the player's built-in radio. I ended up using the skip button quite a bit.

As I said when I first heard about SanDisk's SlotMusic strategy, the format will succeed only if SanDisk quickly signs up some more eclectic curators. I'd gladly pay $40 for 1,000 blues songs curated by Buddy Guy, or 1,000 reggae and dub tunes collected by KEXP's Kid Hops, or the top 1,000 songs of the year as chosen by the editors of Pitchfork.

Better yet, what if SanDisk teamed up with Pandora? The target audiences seem almost identical: music lovers who can't find a radio station that matches their taste, and don't have the time or motivation to hunt down and buy (or steal) a lot of music themselves.

Users could order customized cards based on their musical profiles or Pandora stations. They'd have to be created on demand, which would be more costly than mass-producing the same card thousands of times, but Pandora already has the algorithms and infrastructure to create customized radio stations on the fly, so how much more expensive could it be to rip 1,000 songs onto a microSD card?

Anyway, SlotRadio is an odd but interesting little device, and I hope that SanDisk gives it the chance it deserves by branching out into the niche markets in which music lives today.

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SanDisk's SlotMusic strategy puzzled me at first. I didn't understand why anybody would pay almost the same price as a CD for an easily misplaced microSD card with lower-quality audio. The release of the $19.99 SlotMusic player, which is basically an MP3 player capable of playing these cards, changed my opinion a little bit. But I suggested that the real strength would come in curated cards containing, for example, a selection of songs from the Billboard charts. Given that a regular album cost $14.99 on this format, I figured that a curated card for the same price would include 20 or 30, or maybe 100 songs.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

At CES this week, SanDisk surpassed my expectations with the new SlotRadio, a $39.99 MP3 player with a preloaded microSD card containing 1,000 songs. That's four cents a song, plus you get to keep the player, which is capable of playing the SlotMusic albums and other music contained on a microSD card, and also has an integrated FM tuner.

The first players will contain cards preloaded with Billboard chart hits, which is a fine place to start, but SlotRadio could get really interesting if SanDisk branches out beyond the mainstream. Imagine a collection of the year's top-rated albums by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, or Nic Harcourt. Or heck, go a little further and hire musicians to curate the collections: imagine Keith Richards' favorite blues songs, or an Alan Bishop collection. You might expect that music nuts--the kinds of people who care about Sublime Frequencies--wouldn't relinquish control of their playlists, but at four cents a song, I'd be happy to save myself the trouble of ripping or downloading 1,000 tracks and let somebody else drive for a while. As long as it's a driver I trust.