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[KingSparta]

Rock Band Becomes First To Release CD On Flash Drive
 
November, 2005 - The popular Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies recently came to CustomUSB.com looking to make history. They have now become the first mainstream band in the world to release material on USB Flash Drives. "Barenaked on a Stick," the 128MB USB Flash Drive (right) contains 29 songs, including "Barenaked for the Holidays," a few live versions of fan favorites, as well as photos, chat-buddy icons and a video.

http://www.nydailynews.com/business/story/367106p-312501c.html

'Naked Ladies' on a stick
 
Band strips away CD, goes straight to download
 
By MICHELLE MEGNA and JIM FARBER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
 
The Barenaked Ladies are sticking it to their fans.

On Tuesday, the group will become the first band in this country to release material on a USB flash-memory drive instead of on compact disk. Called "Barenaked on a Stick," the 128MB removable-memory drive contains 29 songs, including "Barenaked for the Holidays 2004," a few live versions of fan favorites, as well as photos, chat-buddy icons and a video.


"We found that CDs made terrible stocking stuffers," says Steven Page, the band's lead singer. "They just don't fit quite right."


Invented in 1998 and commonly used since 2000, USB drives are removable-memory cards about the size of a stick of gum that plug into the USB port of your computer. Also called thumb drives, key-chain drives and flash drives, they're used to transfer digital files of all sorts, including music, video, photos and text documents. Once plugged into your computer, the drive automatically shows up as an icon on your desktop that you simply click on to open.


"Barenaked Ladies on a Stick" also features exclusive material from the quirky Canadian act, such as a demo version of the song "Aluminum" from the "Everything to Everyone" recording session, ad libs from the "Everywhere for Everyone" tour and video snippets from the "Barenaked for the Holidays" recording sessions.


The drive is PC- and Mac-compatible and will go on sale Tuesday at Amazon.com and Werkshop.com for $29.98. That's how much a blank 128MB drive would generally cost. Once you transfer the content, you can use the stick to store other digital files, says James Kim, senior editor of MP3 and digital music for the technology site www.Cnet.com.


Another benefit of the music-on-a-stick approach is that fans can simply load songs on their computer rather than converting them to digital format from a CD.


"Flash drives are pretty common, so putting content on one isn't new," Kim says. "But from a promotional perspective, it's very futuristic. Eventually, who knows, maybe the next generation might forget what CDs are and this will be how music is distributed." (For trivia buffs, the first musicians to issue a USB drive were the German punk band WIZO, which released "WIZO Stick-EP" last year, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.)

[Myron]

Hmm,

Wonder if this will 'stick'   

Sorry, couldn't resist

[tcman41]

Not to pop anyone's bubble but what a rip off.

29 songs and a video at only 128mb, not a very high bit rate i am afraid.

$29 for a 128mb stick, come on, i can go down the street to my local store and buy one for $6.

Concept is neat but the reality stinks.

TC

[KingSparta]

Maybe true but the price of flash is comming down.

one day this read from moving disks will be obsolete

[glynor]

Maybe true but the price of flash is comming down.

one day this read from moving disks will be obsolete

I'm not so sure.  Rated in cost per GB (or TB or YB) magnetic media will always be cheaper than flash (or other volitile) RAM.  This will always lead to the conundrum that you can buy more storage space for less money using magnetic media than RAM.

True, cost/GB on flash will drop to the point where current generation optical media will be pointless, but I'm not so convinced for hard disk space.  I think that if you make the storage space available, people will find things to use it for.  I remember back when IT people would say "You'll never need more than a 3 GB hard drive.  That's an obscene amount of storage!"  If I can buy a flash-based disk for $100 per exabyte (2⁶⁰), but magnetic media is going for $100 per zettabyte (2⁷⁰) -- and I'm buying it for a non-speed intensive purpose -- I think I'll still take the extra capacity, thanks.  Flash also has some long-term storage problems (those lithium batteries do eventually go dead).

I think we are far more likely to see hybrid drives become more and more prevalent.  A 2 TB magnetic drive with a 10-20 GB flash (or maybe even volitile DDR3) cache will be fast, high capacity, and cheap to produce.  Producing a 2 TB flash-only drive will be, for the near term, cost prohibitive.

[KingSparta]

I remember back when IT people would say "You'll never need more than a 3 GB hard drive.

hehehe back in 1983 i was talking to a company about making a 10 meg ram box. this was when 48k of memory was being used on the top of the line computers, and i got the same answer.

shortly there after ICD, Inc Created A 1 Meg MIO board that would allow a 8-bit computer to have a 1 meg ram drive, along with a printer spool and a SCSI interface for a Atari 8-bit computer to use a Hard Drive (Max partition was 16megs).

More Info Can Be Found On One Of My WebSites www.CenterCityBBS.Com

this was when 1 meg was about $1,000+

i have also wondered why floppy drives (now obsolete) only had one read write head, when there was 40 tracks on a 5 1\4 inch floppy drive (this is also depending on computer and OS at the time) 40 heads would make it faster. or why not stick the disk in let the floppy drive read all info into a built in ram drive to be accessed faster.

with new advances in nano technology i can see both memory being used

hard drives have almost come to a dead halt on advancements on how to cram more and more information onto a platter. Maxtor recently created a way to utilize storage space on a hard drive more efficiently gaining 1\3 more storage space on a drive, but all drive makers have come to realize we are reaching the limits of hard drive storage.

this currently is not true for ram and flash drives however

[tcman41]

Man you guys must be old, i think you are talking about stuff that happened before i was born. 

TC 

[KingSparta]

Man you guys must be old

I Had Two Theropods For Pets, They Were Indigenous To My Regon Where I Currently Live (North Carolina). They Are Closely Related To Todays Pit-Bulls.

[JimH]

I had to look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theropod