Sony music download stereo system

Big product news today is the announcement by Sony's Any Music joint venture of a batch of home stereos with ethernet ports and LCD screens, designed for downloading from the company's online music store.

This has already been picked up on Slashdot and in an AP article at Yahoo! News, so we will avoid regurgitating the details here.

Photos at Internet Watch and ZDNet (both articles in Japanese).

We're a bit sceptical about the possibilities for success; as noted on Slashdot, the answer to the AP article's question "imagine if your stereo were linked directly to an online music store" is, for many, "Why does it need to be? My laptop already is." We suspect the basic knowledge of networking (even if it's just setting up an ethernet hub) needed is not that widespread in Japan, and that the people who do know where to plug what are going to be geeks who will be dissatisfied with the limits placed on the service (e.g. one download site, no other online functions apart from CD purchasing). We would note that it's not clear whether the stereos will be usable for streaming music around the house, though--which would certainly make us want it more.

One thing that bugs us regarding the service itself, as with most of them, is that it looks like it's the same old idea of tying up with record companies to get the content. Fine, that's what sells; but we wish that, if they were truly set on creating something revolutionary, Sony and friends could have created a service that integrated with an mp3.com-like model. That might have got them closer to a system that truly "benefits listeners and creators alike," as they claim.

[Update] On the last point, it turns out that Apple is soon to launch iTunes Producer, which will allow exactly the kind of thing we were ranting about above--encoding and uploading to the iTunes Music Store. We think this is tremendously exciting.