SanDisk and the record companies are launching a new music format today dubbed slotMusic. The company hopes music companies will publish entire albums on SanDisk flash memory cards that are smaller than a postage stamp and are expected to replace the music CD.
In an age of downloadable music, the new slotMusic format for distributing MP3 songs is a long shot. But it has heavy-duty support.
The slotMusic cards can fit into mobile phones, but they won't play on Apple's iPhone or iPod products. That may be a killer problem, since more than 4 billion songs have been downloaded from Apple's iTunes music store since 2003. The cards store 1.1 gigabytes of data and can stream music at a high-quality level of 320 kilobytes per second. Albums are expected to cost about $15 and will be stocked near the ever-vanishing CD racks in stores.