S60 Open to new features

I had a discussion with my friend about music. I asked him why he stuck to CDs, why he didn’t listen to MP3s and other similar stuff? As a true friend of music he said that the MP3 music does not have the same high quality as his CDs. This I could accept, but he also had another point that I started to think about more carefully. He had borrowed his friend’s iPod for a while and bought music via iTunes. The computer broke, but he was happy to have all his music on the player as a back up. However, this happiness did not last a long time. He realized that the music could not be easily transferred from the player back to another computer…that it would be on the player until it was deleted. While he had also intended to transfer the music to his mobile phone and see how that worked out, he gave the iPod back at that point and took an even firmer grip of his good old CDs.

I know that this is just a single case, but I think this friend of mine is not alone with his problems. The need to listen to music, also in a mobile context, is there but the practise with all different file types and devices is way beyond smooth and happy for an average user who simply wants to enjoy the music. It is also annoying from the user’s point of view if the content (in this case the music) is stuck on only one device. The users are willing to pay for the music – once – and after that they want to use it in various contexts and, most likely, with various devices.

I know there are many issues with the DRM that make this whole sharing and storing thing much more complicated than e.g. it was/is with copy-right protected CDs – but I’d still dare to speak for separating the device and the content. The user should be able to view and interact with the content (s)he has bought via different devices – one of them being a mobile phone.

All in all, I think that the User Experience of mobile music is not so much affected by the user interfaces of the different players, but the bigger picture of purchasing, buying, converting, transferring, organizing and finally enjoying the music with different devices – and the complexity of this process.