If you haven't read Music Play Evolutions: Part I, please read it here.
With the mass distribution and media attentions through the early days of Napster's music sharing in the Internet, MP3 is becoming a household name these days of playing music at home and on the go. There are at least a dozen variations of hardware that can play the music file but were only accepted by early adopters. The reasons why it didn't reach critical mass quickly because MP3's nature of being a digital file format of easy distribution over the Internet brought on a lot of copyright lawsuits from the music industries early on. In additions, there is also the high cost of memory cards used in the player produced. Lastly there was a lack of a user friendly easy-to-use software to sync the music from your computer to the MP3 player. Thankfully, things have changed.
Apple's iPod came to the rescue. Today it has dominated the portable music player that Sony did with their cassette tape player Walkman back in the 80's. Sony has in fact admitted that they have missed the boat and they are playing catch up but it's going to be a tough one. The hardware is only half the equation here. No only has Apple brought us this amazing iPod hardware to play our music but they have written a software called iTunes. It allows the user to rip their own CD into MP3 files in their computers, to organize them and upload them into the iPod. Best of all is the software is FREE to download. Now that is marketing, half the solution is free and the other half for purchase.
One critical factor that made iPod so successful is its use of hard drive technology versus memory chip/card to really cut the price down on cost per megabyte to store the music files. iPod's award winning zen like design and ease of use to navigate through hundreds of songs for playback separate iPod from its competitors. Let's not forget its signature white ear pieces that tells everybody walking by that we are listening with an iPod even if the unit is out of plain site. That is brand recognition if I ever see one.
Today, there are three variations of player from Apple to target different types of users in the market. The regular sized signature white iPod that holds anywhere between 20GB to 60GB of hard drive space for someone who needs to put their entire CD collections on the go. That's me. :) The iPod mini, the size of a small cellphone, comes with a 4GB and a 6GB model with multitude of colours. It's a hit with the ladies and the most popular colour had to be Pink of course. Lastly, is their latest memory flash based player called the iPod Shuffle which comes in with a 512MB and a 1GB version. It's for the athletic players out there or for anyone who simply want the smallest screenless unit with the ability to charge it via a usb connection in a computer without an AC plug like the former two models. However, iPod Shuffle loses the ability to play songs in the order that you like and it plays your songs in random, hence the name.
With the different changing formats on how music gets played in the past two decades, the landscape has changed significantly where once we would see and showcase our collections of records/CDs in our homes to represent our taste in music is now represent on what we use to play our music on. Accessorizing your iPod is a big industry now with three different iPod models, there are not shortage of options to get you to buy at least one if not two. I bought a leather case from Vajacase and a Griffin's iTrip FM transmitter so I can play my tunes through any FM radio frequency. Now I'm looking at the Bose SoundDock so I can dock my iPod to setup a self contain mini home system. Happy shopping!
Cheers,
Wuju nonono!
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