The Convention Flunkies

When SanDisk teamed with the backwards-thinking music industry late last year to announce the slotMusic initiative, it sounded like an Onion headline. In the year 2009, someone is going to sell prepackaged, individual music albums on SD cards with cover art, liner notes and everything? In this age of the iTunes wireless store, a company actually believes that consumers want to purchase and carry around a new form of locked, physical media? But, this wasn’t a practical joke and at CES SanDisk debuted a $99 portable slotMusic player and some new slotRadio cards, which are basically 1,000-song, genre-specific mix tapes. Sharp even got into the action by announcing the first third-party slotMusic-compatible home stereos. Why?