The cards, which will begin selling in time for the holiday season, will each hold up to a gigabyte of music, or roughly the same amount as a traditional CD. According to SanDisk, four music-industry giants -- EMI Music, SONY BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group -- have agreed to provide content. Retailers Best Buy and Wal-Mart will stock the cards, as will online stores.

The company says the capacity of the microSD will enable musicians to include a variety of old and new media content, including liner notes, videos, album art, and so on. Consumers will also be able to add their own content.

Unanswered Questions

The new music format raises a number of questions, including: 1) are consumers interested in preserving the album/CD format for music, and 2) will consumers be interested in purchasing physical copies of music (even DRM-free) when there are so many digital delivery options?

SanDisk obviously thinks the answer to both questions is yes. The company's announcement featured a brief analysis by Danielle Levitas, vice president of consumer, broadband and new media for the market-intelligence firm IDC.

"slotMusic offers consumers an immediate, tangible and high-quality alternative to CDs and digital delivery," Levitas said. "This year, more than 1.2 billion mobile phones will ship globally, outstripping portable media players by nearly an order of magnitude -- and this trend is accelerating."

Zippy Aima, an industry analyst of digital media for ABI Research, acknowledged that individual track downloads are growing in popularity, but she thinks the new format may offer a useful option.

"Yes, I do agree that the trend in the market is a bit more skewed toward downloading individual tracks," Aima said, "but here we are talking about sale of a memory card that is preloaded with music, is portable, can be hooked to a phone or a media player, and gives flexibility to the user. Priced at $15 a unit, it could be a great gift for the holiday season."

'A Solution in Search of a Problem'

Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research and MobileDevicesToday.com, described SanDisk's new product as "a solution in search of a problem."

"No, it absolutely does not make sense to introduce a whole new physical delivery system for music," Gartenberg said in a telephone call from the Android launch. "There already is a physical delivery system in place; they're called CDs. CDs are easily portable, they are DRM-free, consumers are familiar using them in their computers to transfer music to their iPods, etc." (continued...)

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