Seth Godin links to a NYTimes story about how much space people actually use on their iPods. Well, of all the people surveyed by the Solutions Research Group in Toronto, half of them had less than 100 songs stored on their MP3 players and the average among those with iPods was 505 songs.
Now, this news comes a few days after I lost my 30GB iPod and started considering my replacement options. My iTunes library clocks in at 19.68GB but a Smart Playlist I made revealed that I only listened to over 4.27GB in the past 19 weeks. The new iPod nano is only 4GB and absolutely perfect. The problem is those few times when I would want to listen to one of the songs I don't have on the iPod. It's not so much the inconvenience of not having the song, its the disutility I get from the fear of not having a particular song.
Despite all this, I decided to go with a 1GB shuffle as a temporary solution. My rationale behind this is that Mac Expo is a week away and with the rumors that there's a video iPod coming out (or even larger capacity 4G iPods), I want to have the smallest investment in hardware as possible at this time. Even when I get a larger iPod, the shuffle still has its uses as a much smaller solid-state player and USB drive.
Getting back to Seth Godin's piece, he argues that a larger capacity iPod is more of a status symbol than a necessity:
We don't buy a bigger iPod because we need a bigger iPod. We buy one because we identify ourselves as the kind of person that doesn't squabble over a few bucks when it comes to buying the best.
…
Nobody buys "best" in everything in their life. But in every category that's not a commodity, somebody is buying "best" because they want to, not because they need to.
While I agree to some extent, I think his theory doesn't take into account that Apple positions the feature sets of their iPods to upsell people to the larger iPods they don't necessarily need. Look at the difference between the iPod nano and the iPod lines: anyone with >4GB of music has to get the 20GB iPod whether they have 4.5GB or 19GB of music, and for only $50, you bet that guy with 4.5GB is going to get the 20GB player. The same enormous storage gap (and small price gap) exists between the 20GB and 60GB iPods. With that type of upsell strategy and the fact that Apple doesn't offer iPods in, say, 2GB increments, of course there's going to be a trend to move up along the iPod lines.
I also think the Long Tail (as a proper noun) has a large part to do with Apple's offering of large iPods. The average iPod user might not need more than an iPod nano in terms of storage, but what about those on the Long Tail that do? I know several college students with fat internet connections who have over 50GB of music in their iTunes library (legality notwithstanding) who are more very happy Apple offers 60GB iPods. For all intents and purposes, the R&D cost of the 60GB iPod (or a hypothetical 80GB iPod) is zero and the cost of going from a 20GB to a 60GB drive is minimal. Being in relatively small packaging and easy to manufacture (and switch back to the 20GB "mainstream" iPods), a Long Tail does exist for the iPod and so it is viable to offer these huge iPods despite the statistics showing that "average" users don't need nearly as much storage as Apple offers.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iPod nano, nano, Long Tail, marketing, Mac Expo
