MP3s Are Dead, At Least For Headline Purposes

Overhype

from the the-attention-economy-at-work dept

We know that some news and trade publications these days find life more difficult in “the age of Google News,” when they’re competing with so many other sources for attention. Thanks to the fact that news aggregation systems usually just show a headline and maybe a blurb, these headlines often need to stand out to attract attention (though, there’s some disagreement on that). However, it still amazes us how often headlines have little, if anything, to do with the content of an article. Take, for example, an article in today’s TechWeb: MP3s Could Become Extinct. That’s quite an assertion — and bound to generate some clicks, right? Of course, if you read the actual article, you’ll note that not once is the word “mp3” even mentioned outside of the headline. In fact, the article has nothing to do with the mp3 format at all. It’s basically TechWeb reposting a press release (without an ounce of critical thought, or perspective from someone who might disagree with the claims) from an analyst firm making future predictions about the mobile device market. Like all such analyst predictions, it’s pretty much useless. About the closest the article comes to discussing what the title claims is the idea that standalone digital music players will become a part of mobile phones — which, of course, has nothing to do with the viability of mp3s. At best, the title should be adjusted to wonder if standalone mp3 players will go extinct, but that’s such a minor story, along the lines of all those old stories about how the PDA market was dying, when what they were really reporting was that the PDA market and the mobile phone market were merging. Either way, we’re sure plenty of people clicked to find out about those poor, dying mp3s… only to find them already extinct from the actual story.