Over at The Long Tail Chris is discussing why the iPod Shuffle will not be such a success as its bigger brothers.
“You can think of the thousands of songs on your hard drive as a Long Tail of sorts. Even though you’ve bought, ripped, or downloaded them all, they’re not all your personal “hits”. Some of those tracks are songs you don’t care for on albums you otherwise like; others are albums you wish you hadn’t bought or ripped in the first place. And yet others are songs that you’ve simply grown tired of. In other words, the signal-to-noise ratio in your own collection can be nearly as variable as that in any commercial music service.”
I tend to disagree and here’s why. The target demographic for these flash mp3 players are the kids. And kids do have their personal “hits”, their entire collection tend to exist of hits. I would even say that these are the Grokster/Kazaa users, who download the charts and put the songs on their mp3 player. Taking that into account and the brand of the iPod I do think that Apple has hitten a homerun with the Shuffle.
