Play Button: a wearable, uneditable album

"You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable."

- Steve Jobs (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/52-steve-jobs-just-put-it-in-...)

It is novel. So novel, perhaps, that people won't be willing to pay a lot of money for it. Coin cell batteries won't last long playing albums, and are expensive to replace. The value proposition just isn't there for the end-user except for very limited novelty purposes.

However, it might be there for people who essentially want to advertise their real product (perhaps a CD release, perhaps something else). Sell these at cost or give them away to promote your event or new album? I can see that.

Oh, I see one of the news articles says rechargeable lithium battery. That's good for short-term usability, bad for cost. And it puts an absolute limit on the life of the item at about three years, when all lithium batteries die permanently and it won't be replaceable.

"Hey kids, look what I found in the attic! This cool album from the 'teens, it's built right into a button! Let's see.... oh, darn, the battery is permanently dead and can't be replaced." {tosses into the trash}

This is so close to being awesome. I threw this link to a musician friend of mine when it showed up on Metafilter a while back, and we felt like it was so ALMOST there.

We felt like it wants to be cheaper, and wants to have a USB port so you can put the album you just paid $20 for into all your other devices. (Or a one-time use code to download it.) Then you can stick it on your backpack like any other button, maybe loan it to a friend you want to expose to the act.

Either that or load them with a copy of the concert you just saw. $20 for an item only available at the merch table for a single tour isn't very different from t-shirts; having a physical record of the whole show would be pretty cool.

But as something sold over the Internet for $20+shipping? It's cool but that's like twice the cost of a normal album. The form factor just feels like it wants to be an impulse buy, with impulse pricing.

(And on the other hand... I just paid $3 for a digital download of the new Glitch Mob EP. But I could have spent up to $55 on it to acquire a poster, a T-shirt, and a vinyl copy along with my download. I could see a Deluxe Package that included a Playbutton. As a cool bauble for the True Fans with a really good cashflow, it's not so bad.)

(There is a good chance that they're also so damn expensive because they're made in limited quantities, possibly by the same people who run the site. I drew a Tarot deck a couple years ago; you can get it now for $20 because I found a publisher who got it printed in China, but when I was making the things myself I charged $150 for them.)

Not read all comments, but a spelling mistake is obvious on the details images, that explains the button. It says it will turn on and of respectively. This should be off. That is all. Good product all the same.

I love that music has become so portable that you could actually complain that this form factor takes up too much space.

Here's a list of album formats that were around before MP3s, all of which are larger in size than a button:

  CD
  Minidisc
  Cassette Tape
  8-Track Tape
  Reel-to-Reel Tape
  Record
  Wax Tube

With only one exception above, music storage has gotten smaller with every new format. At this point it's essentially zero. Still, if you told a kid from the 80s that his whole wall of cassette tapes would one day fit in a McDonalds bag full of buttons, he'd be pretty stoked.