ANOTHER FORMAT - THAT'S WHAT WE NEED

We're not entirely sure that the new Rolling Stones album which is being released on a memory card is quite as ground-breaking as they seem to think: didn't Robbie Williams stick out an album on removeable memory the other year to general apathy? What's different this time is that it's a new sort of memory card that's been invented for the purpose - called the Gruvi, god help us. The supposed advantage of this format is that you can move the card from place to place and the music never rests on the player at all:

“You can take the card out and transfer it to other devices and the content stays locked in the card rather than to the device,” [SanDisk spokesman Ken Castle] said.

When we say advantage, of course, we mean it purely in terms of advantage for the record companies - not for the consumer, who are being asked to shell out USD40 for an album on the disk (it does include more music, but you have to pay extra for those) and can't even move the tracks onto your computer or mobile player. In other words, you're paying more to be able to do less with your music.

And surely the main selling points of mobile players is that you can stack up your entire collection on one small device - why would there be value in abandoning that convenience to carry round a whole bunch of extra little disks that you can risk losing, breaking or simply inadvertently feeding to a dog?

It's an idea whose time has come. Unfortunately, it came about fifteen years before the technology was available. The choice of a toecurling name for the product means it doesn't even deserve the honour of obsolesence.

Incidently: Robbie Williams' Greatest Hits were released on Flash memory last October, as the first product in Carphone Warehouse's mobile content Playmobile brand. That doesn't seem to have lasted much beyond the one release, either.

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