"Money is what ends up driving everything," he said.
DataPlay, a privately held company, was founded in 1998 by Steve Volk, the company's chairman, president and chief executive.
Initially, Volk's interest in developing smaller optical discs and micro drivers was to use them as storage media in digital cameras. But in time, a DataPlay spokeswoman said, Volk realized that the tiny, digitally secure discs and drivers were a natural fit for the music industry, which was searching for new ways to protect and distribute recorded music.
Attempts to retrofit CDs to discourage copying and pirating have proved problematic. For example, Arista has copy-protected some of its music CDs only to discover that they will not play in many car- and computer-based CD players.
So enters DataPlay, its content encrypted like Pentagon secrets, casting the long shadows of some of the biggest record companies in the world.
Kevin Clement, senior director of new media operations for BMG, said of DataPlay, said, "Our goal is to continue to release top titles," noting that he has been impressed with DataPlay's "versatility and incredibly small size."
Fringe benefits
BMG will not only be able to add photos and music videos to the discs, he said, but also encrypt extra songs, even entire previously released albums, to which consumers could get access after they paid online for a special content key.
"I don't think the CD is going away anytime soon," he said. "There's too much hardware in the marketplace, but clearly we love to see people enjoy the extra content we can put on a DataPlay disc."
Richards, who is also director of online marketing for Arista Records, said DataPlay is part of a much larger strategy to recapture consumers who are comfortable getting their music and music information online.
Under Richards' direction, Arista is starting a number of subscription-based fan Web sites at US$25 a year. The first features Boyz II Men and offers exclusive material, which could include live concert footage, interviews and pictures, all ideally suited for downloading and playback on DataPlay.
"The real fans will appreciate a site that is dedicated just to them, and they don't mind paying for it," Richards said, adding that DataPlay can open new vistas for the recording industry.
"All of this kind of plays in together. It's going to work. I believe in it."
But overall costs of DataPlay players and media may present an early stumbling block to widespread acceptance, some consumer electronics retailers warn. Prerecorded DataPlay discs will basically be priced more like a DVD than a CD, from US$18 to US$22, Richards said. (Some new releases, however, will be priced comparably to CDs: the new Carlos Santana album, Shaman, will list for US$18 on CD and US$19 on DataPlay, he said.)
For consumers who want to make their own, the price of the raw material for CD burning -- CD-R discs -- has dropped to only pennies a disc when the discs are bought in bulk. DataPlay discs, which have 500 megabytes of storage capacity, or 150 megabytes less than 74-minute CD-R discs, cost US$5 apiece if bought in packages of 10.
And the first DataPlay music player and burner, the iDP-100 by iRiver America, is relatively expensive at US$350; MP3 players with 20GB of memory, or 40 times the capacity of a DataPlay disc, are available for as little as US$300.
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