adoption curve dot net

I really, really want an iPod, and not just because they’re insanely well-designed to appeal to my gadget reflex. I’ve also got a hair-trigger boredom threshold when it comes to music, and very rarely do I find an album with more than about three or fours songs that I want to listen to twice – so the options at the moment are either shuffling CDs every ten minutes or so, or burning my own mixes, which is frankly just too much like hard work. (There is a third of course – just live with it, but hey, I’m a geek…)

Apple licensing the iPod to HP make it all really rather interesting from a portable music player point of view. Firstly, Apple can build more of them, so the unit cost comes down. The selling price can then go down as the adoption curve moves beyond early adopter, or the margin goes up. Secondly, there’s less risk of Apple being stuck with excess inventory that it can’t shift, because that becomes HP’s problems for the units that it’s committed to.

But the most important factor as far as I can see is that Apple have just extended their reach deep into Windows Land. You can be damn sure that every new HP PC is going to come with iTunes preinstalled, which can only increase the likelihood of a) increasing the business through the Apple music store and b) making the hPod the box of choice when HP owner goes shopping. It also gives Apple the benefit of HP’s marketing muscle, which means that there’s a realistic volume alternative to M$’s WMA format out there in the wild. And now that M$ have decided that the home’s the future, that can only be a good thing.

But I’m still puzzled about what’s happened to Sony in all of this – considering they’ve got both the consumer electronics and the content side under one roof, they’re being less than forward about taking advantage of that. Maybe robot dogs are the future?

The latest discovery for remaining sane while spending entire days at a time in front of Dreamweaver is Magnatune, an online record label with a pretty damn impressive artist roster in an appealingly-eclectic range of genres. Appealing for those with catholic tastes in their music, like me.

The part that really caught my eye (apart the iPod-like ability to stream their entire catalogue in random order) was their site strapline – “Magnatune – we’re not evil”. Now that should be a sobering thought for the cocaine-addled fuckpuppets that run the mainstream labels, assuming that those who brought us Brittany and Justin could be considered to be capable of rational thought. I can’t think of too many other industries where a defining a brand positioning involves labelling your competition as “evil” – and maybe that’s an indication of just how far down the hole the mainstream labels have got.

But then I keep reading stuff about “Trusted Computing”, and get the sinking feeling that this is all just a temporary blip, and the technology is about to reach the point where the only stuff I’m going to be allowed to listen to is Brittany and Justin…