SanDisk Offers Another Way to Buy Your Music, and It’s DRM Free!

The problem with music companies is that they are so busy dreaming about the album sales of yore that they aren't preparing for the future. There I said it. Now, let's look at some people who are smart enough to plan for the future of music sales: SanDisk.

Nope, we're not talking about the SanDisk Sansa, or any other MP3 player for that matter. In fact, SanDisk is bypassing CDs and even online music stores altogether in favor of releasing albums on MicroSD cards.



Why, you ask, when that just makes your music incredibly easy to lose? Because SanDisk knows the truth, namely that music is moving away from dedicated MP3 players to mobile devices that do more than just play music. The MicroSD card is perfect for cell phones and PDAs, which people carry with them everywhere because they can play music AND do so much more.

Buying your albums on a MicroSD card still doesn't sound as easy or convenient as buying it from an online music store, but SanDisk has added a few features that just may make it worth your time. The price is going to be somewhere between $7-10, for an entire album. The music will be higher-quality MP3s than what you find at most online music stores, and, most importantly, it will be DRM free!

Praise be to the executive who included that criterion in the negotiations with music companies. SanDisk currently has agreements with four major music labels. And don't despair if you don't have a device with a MicroSD slot; the cards will also come with an adapter that plugs into a USB port on your computer.

Now that I've finished geeking out about the novelty of it all, I'll return to reality. This probably won't become very big, and it will certainly have a short shelf-life. Who wants to fiddle with little cards when buying music downloads is so easy? And mobile devices are moving ever closer to downloading everything wirelessly so that media like MicroSD cards will become increasingly scarce.

While it's an interesting development in the music sales saga, don't expect the MicroSD albums to be more than a temporary business model in the history of music.

If you're not convinced about MicroSD either, we've got some great reviews of the best online music download stores, as well as a few other blogs to keep you busy:

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