The industry was currently suffering under a 15 per cent slump in sales, Forrester analyst Josh Bernhoff said, but people who burned CDs after downloading music on the Internet were not to blame.Increased competition for consumer entertainment dollars from video games, cable television and home theatres was more responsible for the slump, Forrester concluded after a survey of 1,000 online music users.
Really? I never would have thought of that...
The consultancy said record labels must "support consumer demand by making it easy to find music online and enable consumers to copy whatever they want and pay per song, for 100 downloads at a time, or by subscription".
Make it easier than buying a CD or piracy.
Well... you can use it as if it was a blank tape, then copy the results off in a big MP3 file.
So in theory it would be a good way to get audience recorded bootlegs of concerts onto [insert Napster equiv. here] quickly.
And you can use the "tape" itself as a player so you could plug your headphones into the tape and play it's contents. That's a neat trick.
But ultimately it seems kind of pointless...
The main interesting point of this device is that it encodes MP3s on the fly. No need for a computer.
Weird.