SlotMusic Hits First Sour Note in Journey to Topple CD

If SlotMusic hopes to usurp compact discs, it's off to a rough start, according to the new medium's first review. The first problem, the review at TG Daily says, is a lack of promotion, as almost none of the stores the reviewer visited even knew about Sandisk's music-toting memory card. The packaging is also lacking, as it includes just a small plastic case used to shield the card and USB adapter along with a CD jewel case-sized booklet. And then there's the problem of getting the microSD card into your Blackberry. There is a silver lining, however, as the MP3s are unequivocally DRM-free, allowing the buyer to burn them to CDs, copy them onto computers and share them with their friends. Plus, in the case of the Leona Lewis Spirit card, the album only took up roughly a tenth of the space on the card that housed it, allowing buyer to put another 120 songs to the same card. Check out the whole review and pictures of the product here.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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