CES 2009 – a radio with your favourite music
Posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 5:46pm. #
I’ve seen some peculiar ideas, but this one’s just odd.
This is the Sansa slotRadio player. “It’s a small stylish portable music device” (yawn) “that comes bundled wth a slotRadio card” (a what?) “preloaded with 1,000 songs handpicked from the Billboard charts”.
The theory is that buying an iPod is anoying: you bring the unit home, you have install iTunes, rip your CDs or download songs, connect it via cable and synchronise it. But with this, you buy someone else’s idea of decent tunes, DRM-free, on a memory card. And then just… play them.
Cost is $99 and additional cards are $39. And the small print intruigingly says “Much like radio, these songs are played in sequence and cannot be rewound or rearranged”, though you can skip them.
This seems a very expensive and inflexible way of buying and playing music: but I can see that it might appeal to some people. It does beg the question why the 1,000 “hand-picked hits from Billboard’s charts” are any better than the 1,000 hand-picked hits on Planet Rock, and if so, why bother – particularly when the unit has a full-featured FM radio on it?
To my mind, there are two reasons people like the radio:
- it plays music that I want, from a semi-random playlist picked by people who like that kind of music (or track the charts)
- there’s banter and conversation from the DJ playing it (ha!)
Alas, I seem to be in a minority with the latter part – most of my friends prefer their iPods because it gives them a lot more of the former, and none of the latter. The only problem is that they have to put the music in themselves, so there’s no chance of stumbling across a new song they haven’t heard before.
This gadget, by the sounds of it, gets around that, and will at least sprinkle your listening with some new tunes you’ve never heard before. Radio without the DJs. Music you’ll like that you’ve never heard before.
Whether it’ll succeed or not, is another question. It might work better as part of a subscription plan ie you get a new set of tunes every month or so.