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Loading ...The Pitch: The new Sansa slotRadio player is a portable music device that comes pre-loaded with 1,000 songs on a music card curated by experts at Billboard. Perfect for moms, teens and tweens, walkers, workout fanatics, travelers, or anyone with little time, patience or technical know-how to download music song-by-song, the slotRadio player is bundled with a pre-loaded card that features 1,000 of Billboard’s top-charted songs categorized into playlists. Consumers can choose and discover music from a variety of playlists, including rock, contemporary, R&B/Hip Hop, “chillout,” “workout,” and more. Perfect for the fitness buff or traveler, the compact and light Sansa slotRadio player comes with a convenient clip for wearing, a FM tuner and a bright screen for exceptionally simple navigation and discovery of tunes. The player will be available in February with an MSRP of $99.99 — this includes the audio player and 1,000 song Billboard slotRadio card. Additional slotRadio cards will be sold by genre — 1,000 songs of new music — for $39.99 MSRP
Pros: The cost per song for the player and card combo is less than 10 cents. Future bundles of 1,000 songs on a slotRadio card go for under 4 cents a song. If you look at it that way, it’s hard to argue with the bang per buck that comes with buying into the slotRadio premise. Of course, you don’t get to pick the songs, but the average cost per song on iTunes is, following the recent announcement at MacWorld, between 69 and 99 cents so, you only have to be into 3-4 percent of the choices on your slotRadio card to feel good about the music you just bought blind. It seem almost too good to be true.
Cons: $39.99 is not an impulse-buy price point and consumers are not necessarily going to buy music in bulk just because it is cheap. It’s also another format and another piece of hardware vying for mindshare in a market that seems to lack definition by anyone other than Apple. You can go to your local music store and find bargain bins with all kinds of cut-price compilations, but that’s not where the action is. Having said that, somewhere in the world right now, there’s a Time-Life infomercial playing, and it’s all about selling a mass of songs in a particular genre for one neat bundle price.
Recommendation: If SanDisk markets this product outside of the traditional consumer electronics channels, and targets the kind of people who aren’t computer-savvy, I can see how they might be able to make a compelling case its efficacy. However, traditional digital music users are unlikely to be as interested, if only because of the lack of control that they have over the music libraries. I’d like to see the different libraries of songs as they come out because, even if they are half decent or interesting, you can’t argue with the cost-per-song metrics.
