Friday, May 14, 2004
Sony's music service already well-supported?
A lot of people have been disparaging toward Sony's new Connect music service, but Ryan at Sellout Central uncovers an interesting statistic.
Aparantly a variety of Sony's existing hardware can play the ATRAC files of the service, totally 2.5 million compatible players! This is about the same number as the iPods that have been sold to date.
When you take into consideration that many of Sony's ATRAC players are much less expensive (a Sony CD Walkman is $80 at Circuit City) then an iPod, that bodes very well for the future of the service.
Ryan makes the bold claim that Connect will be eclipsing iTunes' soundscan sales by January of 2005. No one can say whether that will really happen, but now that I know that ATRAC is much better supported than I realized (I thought it was just a handful of their MD players), it certainly makes me think twice about iTunes being a primary source of music in terms of portability..
Aparantly a variety of Sony's existing hardware can play the ATRAC files of the service, totally 2.5 million compatible players! This is about the same number as the iPods that have been sold to date.
When you take into consideration that many of Sony's ATRAC players are much less expensive (a Sony CD Walkman is $80 at Circuit City) then an iPod, that bodes very well for the future of the service.
Ryan makes the bold claim that Connect will be eclipsing iTunes' soundscan sales by January of 2005. No one can say whether that will really happen, but now that I know that ATRAC is much better supported than I realized (I thought it was just a handful of their MD players), it certainly makes me think twice about iTunes being a primary source of music in terms of portability..
