Today I read the New York Times while I was crossing the Manhattan Bridge into downtown Manhattan. Suddenly, with the turn of a page, my dreams of all-mobile music were both brightened and dimmed.

SanDisk, the memory device manufacturer, has developed slotMusic cards, a pre-loaded memory card with music stored on it that you can pop into your music-able phone.

The devices do not depend at all on an Internet connection.

slotMusic cards enable consumers to instantly and easily enjoy music from their favorite artists without being dependent on a PC or internet connection. Users simply insert the slotMusic card into their microSD-enabled mobile phone or MP3 player to hear the music – without passwords, downloading or digital-rights-management interfering with their personal use.

slotMusic cards will be bundled with a tiny USB sleeve ensuring seamless interoperability with all computers – Windows, Linux and Mac. The upshot is that slotMusic will enjoy an unparalleled, pre-existing install base at launch: hundreds of millions of multimedia-phones, virtually any computer with a USB connector and a growing number of in-car sound systems will be able to play slotMusic cards.

I see iTunes under threat, and I also see the perception that music would somehow come streaming into our phones through wi-fi or by tapping into broadband diminishing.

In the advertisement, Danielle Levitas, VP–Consumer, Vroadband, and New Media at IDC, is quoted saying that this year global manufacturers will ship 1.2 billion mobile phones made ready to play digital music.

Pros

I can see the benefit for US consumers. Constantly streaming Internet reception is spotty for most people here. For example, in New York, you cannot get Internet, wiFi or cellular reception while you are on the train, ever. That’s different than in other cities like Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, and Singapore, where you can usually get some kind of reception anywhere underground.

Same goes for wireless service inside. Many buildings, even the new ones, are operated by a management that does not consider the costs of installing wireless DAS inside a utility closet as anything more than more money dished out for tenant amenities.

There’s also a bitof a kerfluffle (also here) over whether one should have to go to Apple for all one’s music needs online.

This new device at least puts a barrier into that stream of thinking. And it may appease people who have been made scornful over the incessant selfishness of Apple’s music methodologies.

Cons

But I see some real cons here, and they mostly center on how people I don’t know are determining how I listen to music and what I listen to, as if they know what I like. Let’s leave alone for right now the fact that I’d probably have to buy a completely new phone now in order to listen to music this way.

This is the singlemost confounding thing for me about marketing and selling anything: That there’s apparently some big cloud of experts in the sky who watch me as if they were on Mt. Olympus, and because they are such surefire arbiters of music taste, they know exactly what to package, how to pacakge it and when to deliver it. And because they are the gods, they believe that they have marketed and priced this methodology and application so well that I can do nothing more than buy it. I am resistant to the fact that they have been trapped in four walls with the same group of people for eighteen months coming up with ways to sell this to me, so I better damn well like it! Of course I will! How could I resist!?

Yes, sure, I will buy the slotMusic at my discretion, if it offers me something I can’t get somewhere else, but come on, what’s with the trapping music mentality? Why do you have to market something to me that is really all about making sure Sony BMG and Warner Music don’t lose their audiences?

Also, music that I have to wait for does not appeal to me.

While I don’t like iTunes as my single portal for music choices, it is easy to get to through a phone and through a laptop. I can come across all kinds of music that I like, even if I am casually surfing through selections. And I don’t have to depend on someone else to package it for me. I simply 1-click and retrieve.

What is this old-fashioned sentiment that I have to have someone else decide how to package what I may or may not want to hear? I don’t like this idea that it comes to me already packaged, as if the music manufacturers are telling me that their way of doing music deals should format my tastes. No, no and no!

And the real issue, which we will cover later in more detail: Why does music have to be through a single subscription service and a single portal? It’s like we keep re-inventing music services and we do so so that it will fit into the old idea of radio listening.

It seems that every effort to provide music for the consumer is really an effort to commit millions of people to at least a single inelastic copyright protected form listening. I keep having this image of music listeners with chains binding their earphones against their ears.

Back when I was a child, we listened to the radio to find out about new music. Certainly, this was force-feeding “acceptable” music to the masses and delivering advertising on the backbone of tunes.

Back then, “independent” music was not really something that made it on the radio. Independent and “free” music was created by bands that played in bars and at neighborhood barbecues, or at dirty hole-in-the-wall places your mother would not let you visit. If they got on the radio, it was because those hipsters in Chelsea, NYC or those far out strung-out art types in L.A. got wrapped into something and being the self-made arbiters of cool, they decided what the rest of the country should listen to.

Digression:And isn’t it really that we look to New Yorkers for guidance because everything here is more expensive, so it must be good? Bulls**t! Walk through Times Square! It’s a recreation of all the bland and boring mainstream Americana that exists in Des Moines.

Then there was MTV, and a whole lot of fun that was, when it didn’t become Punk’d and Jackass.

And then there was iTunes and now there is Nokia’s phone program called “Comes With Music.”

It’s a noble and welcomed effort to push a touchscreen phone that comes with a yearlong subscription to “free” music into the tight iPod-clenching paws of an online and down-loadable music fan base that has been hypnotized into thinking Apple is the only source for legitimate music.

In this industry, fast, easy, and free are the selling points. Looks like Nokia is going to do that. Love those Finnish mobile innovators!

Nokia’s package will differ from others on the market as users can keep all the music they have downloaded during a 12-month subscription period. There are no charges for tracks downloaded, since the cost is bundled to the phone price.

“‘Comes with Music’ could potentially bring free music to millions of consumers, radically changing the music industry, and offering a significant threat to Apple’s dominance,” Strategy Analytics’ David MacQueen said in a research report.

“In a market where price and selection are so much more important than brand to consumers, Apple cannot count on retaining users when competing with an offering which seems free to the end user.”

Now you can — even the next day or later. Just as long as you can remember how to hum or sing a few bars, you can find out what it’s called.

There’s a new app for the iPhone from Midomi that lets you hum or sing part of a song, and it will deliver search results to your phone.

Contribute

This also works over the web (for you non-iPhone types), but you’ll need a microphone on your computer.

There’s an old expression, “The less you know about how laws and sausage are made, the happier you’ll be.” Which is to say that the process behind creating these things is so gruesome that knowing what goes into it, would put you off democracy, or your dinner.

After two days at the Music Matters conference at the Hong Kong Grand Hyatt last week, I think the same is true for the music industry. The less you know about how music ends up on your phone, the happier you’ll be.

But out of the madness, there rose a distinctive voice of clarity: Terry McBride, founder of Nettwerk Music Group, and the only music middleman who seems to truly understand how web 2.0 — including the mobile web — really works.

McBride founded Nettwerk 14 years ago, and has since risen to fame by encouraging his artists, like Avril Levigne and The Bare Naked Ladies, to engage their fans using the new tools available — crowd sourcing and social networking.

I sat down with McBride on the sidelines of Music Matters and asked him what the future of music looked like:

How do you create value in digital music?

Scarcity creates value, but the Internet is a giant photocopier. As soon as a song is released it is no longer scarce and has little [monetary] value.

But, within the music business, there are a number of forms of scarcity. When a song is about to get released, for about five minutes it’s scarce. We get first point of entry – we get to introduce it how we want. That has some uniqueness to it.

The access to the artist is unique. Everything you wrap around that can have scarcity. You can create a release experience that brings 10 million people to one place – you can monetize those eyeballs, you can create hoops that users have to go through before they can hear a song for first time.

It’s crucial for any artist to have an authentic relationship with the fans. That’s emotional scarcity. Their willingness to give has the value.
Much of the music industry is missing the future because they’re not talking to who they’re trying to sell their products to.

The media business is based on control: what you see, when you see it and for how much. That’s now gone. The only control you have now is when it’s first released. The only scarcity you have is the creator and the brand around it.

Should the Internet be blamed for the Music Industry’s problems?

No, the internet takes a niche and turns it into a market place.

It is what it is, and we’re not going back. Moore’s Law doesn’t just show us a doubling in speed and power, but also a doubling in the applications and the imagination that goes into it. There’s also an emotional Moore’s Law that’s doubling by some greater multiple. Technology allows it to happen, but technology doesn’t create all this stuff that people are doing behind it. And that’s what’s growing much faster.

I think this is a big part of what’s being missed: how we as people consume music and how it affects us. And the multiple sensory points it has to hit to connect with us. It starts with basic text, the adds static visuals, then audio, and then moving visual. The more of those points you add together, the better the chances go way up some one remembering what they just consumed. The Internet allows artists to go beyond just music.

We need to think of the music business within all those sensory points.

How can mobiles contribute to those sensory points?
The possibilities are unlimited. But they are very culture coded depending where you go in the world. I think it’s Very interesting that within Asia the data shows a desire for consumers to have just one personal device — the mobile. But in North America we still have the desire to have two.

But the device itself doesn’t matter all that much. Everything is going up into the clouds. It’s not going to be physically with us, instead we’re only going to want access to it. The better a mobile can access rich media, the more it will create a demand and a great economic model.

The desire to personalize the device is a whole nother emotive connection. But the mobile is just that, it’s just a connecting point. It allows me to connect with anything – with you, with music, with email, with photos, with whatever.

So, music isn’t just some commodity that need to be monetized?
A song is an emotion. Whether a high-grade recording or a low-grade mp3, it’s an emotion.

It’s about psychology. We’re all in tribes. Your tribal peers are your biggest influencers. Tribes get bigger thanks to the internet and mobiles. It’s about sharing your passions.

My thought: let people share. Create a site where you can share it with others, wrap ads around it – and now I can monetize your behavior, rather than the music. Even if that’s on YouTube. All the publishers and labels (except Viacom) have a revenue sharing deal with YouTube.

If I can get Avril to create something for YouTube, turning her 200,000 hits into half a billion hits — that’s the same as selling a million records.

Why is it taking so long for the industry to seize these opportunities?
The most amazing innovations after they are done seem really simple. It’s all because you can’t see it, because you don’t know what it looks like.

I think it’s about having fun! Imagination is the most powerful tool we have. Once you know what it looks like the challenge is in bringing everyone’s mind into the same room.

I don’t believe holding onto an idea is power, I believe that sharing it is. I believe that a high-tide floats all boats. The more people that can be emotionally affected by the music the better.

The music middleman, the industry executive, the pop-star packager: who needs them? Aren’t they just hampering creativity and impeding technological progress as they exploit both the bands and the fans?

Well, yes. And no.

Mobile internet music distribution is a US$2.9 billion industry, according to IFPI which represents the recording industry worldwide. But the industry is running scared, knowing that they won’t be able to sustain those numbers for long. Digital automation will eventually disintermediate many of the current jobs that the industry is clinging to — including deciding what makes a hit song: hitsongscience.com.

However, the middleman may rise again. Aspiring musicians, bands and pop divas will need a new kind of promoter — someone mobile and tech-savvy. Obscurity is the enemy in the music business and anyone who can help a struggling artist get a little bit more famous is someone worth having around.

The middleman is dead. Long live the middleman.