As far as I understand this particular sort of high capacity storage is read only, so as far as making storage drives in the sense of a hard drive, then it probably won't happen. Like Tony said, the possibility of making a consumer burner for something like this is very well and far off in the future. With storage of this capacity, and I assume it would be cheap (because if it will not be cheap then what is the point?) -- then it has a good potential for upsetting the current way that things are done. The way I see it, the economics and technology being what it is, and the existence of mp3 and the internet, it will soon be more economically viable for artists to sell direct and distribute direct to the consumer. For this to happen, things like the empeg need to exist to upload discrete songs, and organize these songs. So the customer goes on the net, buys a handful of songs, and puts them onto the unit.

The empeg in this case is the vehicle for taking a song from the home computer, storing it, organizing it and eventually playing it back. Key to the empeg software is the ability to take a song, transfer it, and then organize into playlists.

Now, if technology magically appears capable of storing 100,000 hours of music on a medium that costs 10 cents? What then? And this technology is read only, and the mechanism for producing it is only within reach of larger corporations like the music giants, then what?

Obviously, the need to organize and play back the music still exists... but the ability to synchronize the music over to a music player, and organize playlists in the same manner will no longer be there!

What's more is that the economics of making a single super-cd with 14 songs versus 10 million songs will be pretty much the same! Encryption technology exists to lock down all these songs, so surely record companies can distribute uber-collections where the consumer can purchase very cheaply, unlock codes to play back specific songs. See, consider, is it currently faster to transfer 100 gigabytes over a ISDN link or is it faster to save 100 gigabytes onto a few backup tapes and put some stamps on them? When a leap in cheap storage occurs like this, it might well cause a shift in distribution.

So what I'm getting at here is CURRENTLY it is cheap to take a CD, rip it, encode it, upload it to the empeg, organize it, play it back. OR download a song, upload it to the empeg, organize it, play it back. But if it becomes the case that you can get this uber-CD and the uber-CD player *for free* (because why wouldn't it be free?).... and all you had to do was surf the net and download unlock codes to free up music, then it obliterates the need to download the music, rip the music, encode it, worry about mp3 lossiness, or go to a store, or whatever! The empeg as it exists today wouldn't be set up for subscription based music, so in that way, the empeg would be obsolete. Which is not to say maybe a little bit of it might carry over to an application like this but most of it will be lost on a concept like this. A concept like this is possible only when price for storage is super cheap, *and* the capacity rockets up faster than available bandwidth and/or makes music easier to obtain than ripping.

The big assumption here is that this sort of technology "magically" appears, which it won't for a while.

Calvin "speculating"