Frank Myers

Toronto

banker

A lot of high level fluff without depth of research data and methodologies used to project the numbers.

I guess IDC needs to sell it report.

What I'd like to see is the capacity per unit figures, sort of "barrel of oil" or 8 oz bottle case equivalent in the pop industry. If a 256Mg flash player holds say 64 songs then one 40gig iPod is equivalent to 156 flash players.

Furthermore, out of all those flash player buyers, who will or can afford to buy more music? In terms of song buyer "capacity" per player, the kind of player yield vastly different song purchase intentions. In the airline industry analysts talk about "Revenue Passenger Miles" (# of seats time miles flown) so we could dub this song buying capacity "Download Song Revenue" (# of songs/meg times megs). On an extreme basis this means a 256 mg flash buyer would have the potential to buy $64 of songs vs. the 40 gig iPod or iRiver owner who *could* buy $10,000 of songs.

In reality the guy who owns a 256 flash player will just transfer songs more frequently while the iPod guy will just keep *all* songs on the iPod. On an intuitive basis I'd think the guy who can afford an iPod for $400 can afford to buy more songs than the guy who spends less for a flash player.