PDA Lets Shoppers Listen To Music In Store

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the not-quite-sure-how-this-works... dept

In a development that is sure to draw lots of fire from the RIAA, a Japanese company says they’ve developed a gadget that lets you listen to music just by looking at the CD’s case. The idea is that you take this device into a music store, and let it scan the bar code on the CD. The device will then begin playing the music from the CD. I have no idea how this could possibly work. The only ways I can think of making this happen is that either it has every album stored in whatever memory it has (unlikely) or it’s some sort of device that wirelessly connects to the internet, and looks up stuff on CDDB and then immediately finds the right song on a P2P network (also unlikely). Maybe I’m reading the article wrong, though, and the device is designed for the music stores themselves, so they can offer it to customers to use, and the store can simply have a large digital jukebox hidden away somewhere, and the device simply connects to that box? That seems a lot more likely, I guess.