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Can iRiver run through it?
In the battle royal for second place in the MP3-player space, company searches for ways to differentiate itself from the pack.
Slow and steady wins the race.
That cliché, oft-repeated in various derivations by makers of would-be iPod killers over the last several years, is the only hope for some of them. Apple's portable-music juggernaut has established a daunting lead, with market share hovering above 70 percent.
So the big question is among the swarm of companies battling it out for second, third, and fourth in the MP3-player space, who will survive the eventual shakeout? The field is crowded.
iRiver, Creative, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony, Toshiba, and Cowon all continue to put out new MP3 players to compete with the iPod.
iRiver's U10
iRiver America CEO Jonathan Sasse says he is supremely confident that his company, one of the early movers in the space, will be one of the survivors. iRiver has been a consistent innovator in the space, offering video-ready players before Apple unveiled its video iPod and rolling out a line of tiny, flash-based players long before the iPod Nano stole the show.
"We're going to continue to innovate and put out the best products on the market," he said in an interview with MP3.com. "We feel very confident in our position in this space."
Sasse acknowledges that Apple has built itself quite a lead with great design and its ubiquitous marketing campaign that has cemented the iPod's cool factor.
But Sasse says iRiver has a cool factor of its own among hardcore digital-music junkies.
To that end, the company just rolled out a new monthly music promotion on its Web site, giving away music and video downloads from select up-and-coming artists. The first batch of artists featured Calexico, the Shins, People Under the Stairs, and the Streets, among others.
"We wanted to let our users come to our Web site and have an opportunity to explore some artists maybe that they haven’t heard of before," Sasse said. "We don't just want to sell people a device and then it's completely up to them to figure out what to do from there."
iRiver's T30
In keeping with developing a post-transaction bond with its customers, iRiver also recently offered customers a chance to upgrade its T10 and T30 devices to make them compatible to work with the content of spoken audio firm Audible.
"We don’t want people to feel like once they've bought one of our players, that it's out of our minds and that they're out of luck," Sasse said. "This is an opportunity for us to go back and upgrade a product that we have out on the market. We want our customers who have been loyal to us to stay with us."
"A lot of companies out there are content to put products out and then move on to the next one right away and forget the ones they just released," he said, a subtle yet clear nod to one of the oft-stated criticisms of Apple.
But Sasse isn't kidding himself in thinking that design, marketing, and customer relations are going to put a big enough dent in the iPod lead.
At the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles earlier this year, Sasse said it's not really about any of that stuff, but about connecting a device to a store as well as the iPod is connected to iTunes.
"As good as the iPod is, it's really not that spectacular of a device," he said.
"Designing a better product than the iPod is not the real trick. Getting the mindshare of the consumer and getting people aware that there are other places to get good content than iTunes is really our biggest challenge. It won't take a great device to overthrow [Apple]."
When this kind of seamless integration will happen has been the million-dollar question for the past several years.
Microsoft has hinted that Urge, its joint effort with MTV, could be the service that rivals iTunes, but neither company has uttered a peep about its long-awaited debut since chatting Urge up at CES in January.
Speculation has surrounded Internet giants Amazon and Google in recent months about their respective digital-music plans, but neither has publicly confirmed anything.
Sasse is mum on iRiver's connection to any of those potential offerings, but he says his firm will be "right in the middle" of whatever emerges to take on the iPod-iTunes arsenal.
They better be, says Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg.
"They have to find some way to compete with this Apple iPod-iTunes experience that has taken so much market share away from the others," he said. "Until that happens, being number two doesn't really matter all that much. The real challenge is find a way to differentiate yourself from the folks down in Cupertino."
Just you wait, Sasse said.
"We are going to see an environment in the next couple of months where it will be very easy to sit down and compare the offerings side by side," he said. "And what you'll see is something that will be as good or better than [iPod and iTunes]. That will start to resonate."
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