Me and the Music - Goin' Mobile

Requiem for a Heavyweight: iPod reign is utterly over is a fantastic article at from Tomi Ahonen who is a four-time bestselling author and consultant, lecturing at Oxford on high tech and convergence.

Tomi had a controversial article on the pending demise of iPods dominance last September 2005 and later, correctly forecasted for 2006 how the mobile phone business will take over the MP3 music player market. Long story short, Apple's introduction of the iPhone totally makes sense to capture a slice of the market where musicphones are outselling iPods 7 to 1 - 309 million musicphones to 46 million iPods.

Read about how the iPhone stacks up against the competition in the world market against musicphones such as the LG Chocolate, Sony Ericsson Walkman and the Nokia N Series Phones

And last...I leave you with this:

... Which brings me to the removable storage. iPods have internal storage only. Any smartphone today has removable storage. Today 4 GB of removable is already available, many times the storage of low-end Nanos. And now you can switch series of music collections - both among your own tastes (if you have a large collection) - or among your friends, simply by snapping in a different memory module. Most musicphones allow hot-swapping this without removing the battery, meaning changing gigabyte musicfiles is as easy as changing CDs on a CD player. The phone is superior at its storage options. The phone is Better.

The days of the Brick and Mortar music stores are going to be hard pressed to keep up unless they also reinvent themselves just as Apple is doing moving from the iPod to the iPhone to maintain their market. Being a niche player of physical goods will be challenging in a digital world for record labels as well.