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This can be the future. CD’s will be gone in a few years, people are tired of having those cd cases laying collecting space that can be used for something else. Goodbye CD’s and hello to the new and improved Slotmusic

FOXNews.com – Record Labels to Sell Music on Memory Cards – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News
NEW YORK — Just as vinyl once gave way to compact discs as the main physical medium for music, could CDs be replaced now by a fingernail-sized memory card?

Perhaps not entirely, but SanDisk Corp., four major record labels and retailers Best Buy Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are hoping that albums sold on microSD memory cards will at least provide an additional stream of sales.

The companies unveiled plans Monday to sell memory cards loaded with music in the MP3 format, free of copy protections.

Called “slotMusic,” the new format is meant to address two intertwined trends.

Most albums are still sold in a physical format — 449 million were sold on CDs in 2007, while 50 million were sold digitally, according to Nielsen SoundScan — yet CDs are decreasingly popular. Albums sold on CD dropped almost 19 percent last year.
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Given this, the record labels — Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp. and EMI Group PLC — are hoping slotMusic can be another physical revenue source, and one that is more versatile than CDs given the kinds of gadgets people carry around these days.

Unlike when the CD was introduced and people had to buy new players, many people already have the ability to play slotMusic albums, since many cell phones and multimedia players support microSD cards.

These new albums will come with a small USB dongle that lets buyers use them with computers, too. [The USB dongle will also enable users to transfer the songs to iPods, which don't have memory-card slots, via a PC.]

“Particularly in this kind of economic climate, the idea of being able to use an electronic device you already own to enjoy music rather than going out and buying a dedicated player is pretty compelling,” said Daniel Schreiber, who heads the audio-video business unit at SanDisk, which created the microSD card format and is working on the technology behind slotMusic.

Schreiber said slotMusic albums will be sold on 1 gigabyte microSD cards, which means they will be able to hold a full album and related content such as liner notes and cover art.

Buyers will be able to use extra space on the cards to hold songs and photos from their own collections.

[The files will be MP3s encoded at a bitrate of 320 samples per second, the highest possible setting ensuring roughly CD-quality sound.]

The cards and dongles will come in boxes similar to current CD packaging, and Schreiber expects the cost of slotMusic releases to be “in the ballpark” of current CD prices.

It’s not yet known exactly when — or how many — albums will be initially sold in the format, but Schreiber expects retailers to give a “sizable amount of shelf space” to slotMusic albums.

The albums are expected to debut at multiple retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores in the U.S., and later in Europe.

Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of Universal Music Group’s eLabs digital music unit, said the label will initially release about 30 titles in the slotMusic format. The titles will include old and new albums, such as one by singer Akon.

“We want to provide the benefits of digital music to people who go to physical retail environments,” he said.

Asked whether he sees the format taking the place of the CD, Caraeff said, “I think we would certainly hope that would be the case, but I don’t think we are so tied to that.”

NPD Group entertainment analyst Russ Crupnick sees a potential for slotMusic to emerge as a compelling format.

He said the industry needs “desperately” to give people a new reason to head back into the music sections at brick-and-mortar stores.

“Not that we want them out of the gaming section, but once they’re done looking at ‘Guitar Hero’ we want them to come look at the music section,” he said.

What a great story, I have to say I really like Mickey and the movies he was in, I think one of his great movies also was Domino he played a great part in that movie.
rammy

The Wrestler: Mickey Rourke’s Comeback – TIME

It’s all anyone’s been talking about at the two big film festivals: Venice, which ended today, and Toronto, which began Thursday. One group of critics has seen The Wrestler, the other is waiting, tongues out like famished dogs, for tomorrow evening’s North American premiere. The movie’s producers have withheld U.S. rights until after the film shows here, anticipating a festival furor. On Saturday, the movie won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival — the event’s top honor. Already, the two Hollywood trade papers have raved about the movie’s star performance, and the Los Angeles Times headlines the question: “Will The Wrestler get hold of an Oscar for Mickey Rourke?”

My guess: maybe, since Rourke gives not only the kind of performance that Hollywood, the critics and some of the public think burrows into the very essence of acting. He made himself nearly unrecognizable — put on maybe 50 pounds, studded his face and body with the scars of war — to play a has-been fighter hoping for a last shot at the big time. It’s the kind of punishment that won kudos for Lon Chaney and Paul Muni in the old days, and helped Robert De Niro to an Oscar in Raging Bull playing Jake LaMotta. (He got himself into fighting shape, then he gained a ton of weight! Acting!) Beyond the stunt aspect, Rourke does strong, sensitive work. All praise to him, and to Darren Aronofsky for casting the actor and directing him to turn a standard fiction into quirky, coherent behavior.

But the movie itself is pretty bad.

My own anticipation sank with the opening credits: “Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood.” That list spelled out the plot: damaged veteran, middle-age girlfriend, young daughter. The Wrestler never rose above fight-movie bromides, never disspelled my gloom. The character stereotyping makes Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa, by comparison, seem as swathed in moral twlight as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. The movie’s serioso sentimentality is doubly strange since the script is by Robert Siegel, an ex-staffer of The Onion and co-writer of The Onion Movie. His old job was puncturing cliches; here he recycles them.

Story goes like this. Back in the ’80s, Randy “The Ram” Robinson (real name: Robin Ramzinsky) was a hero-stud pro wrestler; he fought “the Ayatollah” top of the card at the Garden. But after 20 years on the downalator, his body ballooned with exercise, bloated with steroids and damaged with the death of a thousand cuts, Randy works tank towns for a few hundred bucks. He’s been locked out of his Jersey trailer home for laggard payments. And to secure the fans’ roving attention, his ring rivals are getting into extreme fighting; one fellow, who looks like an angry Ozark farmer, asks Randy if, during their bout, he can use a staple gun on his chest and back. That episode triggers a heart attack, and Randy is told never to wrestle again.

Anyone who’s seen a boxing film will be able to predict the rest of The Wrestler. Randy gets one more chance: a 20-year rematch in Wilmington of his Ayatollah fight. Will he pass it up to save his life? (Not if there’s gonna be an Act Three.) And the woman in his life — will Randy manage to connect with his estranged daughter (Wood), who hasn’t forgiven him for abandoning her? (That’s Act Two, where the only innovation is that the girl’s mother is never mentioned). And will a local stripper, well played by Tomei, respond to his plaintive love and drive down to see what may be Randy’s last fight? (Can’t have a fight movie without a “Yo, Adrian!” moment.)

Aronofsky has been one of the few American directors whose movies upset the complacent status quo. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain were demanding and rewarding in various ways: the first whacko, the second gritty, the third sumptuously romantic, and all marvelously dense with imagery. The Wrestler is the first Aronofsky film to be visually inert. His main camera habit is to follow Randy, just his imposing back, as he trudges through corridors toward another fight. (Martin Scorsese virtually patented that shot, in Raging Bull and Goodfellas). The trope does pay off later in the film, when Randy, briefly retired, winds up behind a deli counter. That’s a deft touch, as is the easy camaraderie Randy shares with the other veteran showmen. But Aronofsky’s main contribution was to lion-tame a jolting performance out of a forgotten hero.
I speak as one who invested early in Rourke futures. Reviewing Barry Levinson’s 1982 buddy comedy Diner, I wrote that “the prize in this gallery is Mickey Rourke, who made a strong impression in Body Heat and assumes command of Diner
whenever he is onscreen. With a face as handsome as it is streetwise,
and a smile that manages to be both shy and cunning, Rourke has the
potential of a young Jack Nicholson.”

Soon he started making good on my bet. Within a few years, Rourke had
won starring roles in a bunch of fascinating weirdies: Francis
Coppola’s Rumble Fish (Mickey was Motorcycle Boy), The Pope of Greenwich Village, Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon, the S-M erotic drama Nine 1/2 Weeks (with Kim Basinger, who also made a comeback at Venice in The Burning Plain), the satanic thriller Angel Heart (De Niro was the Devil), as a gangster in Elephant Man makeup in Johnny Handsome and a lowlife genius in a film of Charles Bukowski’s Barfly
directed by Barbet Schroeder (who also had a film at Venice; the Lido
was one big Rourke reunion). The guy was sexy, dangerous, adventurous
in his choice of roles. The actor’s cliche “totally committed to the
process” could have been coined for Rourke.

But that was the ’80s, when directors still wanted to hire him.
He pissed away what should have been his prime by curling inside the
legend of the Difficult Star, acquiring an odor as rowdy and
unreliable. And since he wasn’t a box office magnet, why take the
chance? Bio stats on the Internet Movie Database synopsize Rourke’s
90s: “Turned down Bruce Willis’ role in Pulp Fiction … Filmed a role in [Terrence Malick's] The Thin Red Line, that eventually got cut…. Walked off the set of Luck of the Draw
when the producers refused to let him include his pet chihuahua in the
movie.” Instead, Rourke, who had been a serious amateur boxer as a
teenager, went professional, submitting himself to the rigorous
training, abuse and combat that would pay off in The Wrestler.

This decade he did a swell turn, again under a ton of makeup, as a vengeful ex-con in the Robert Rodriguez-Frank Miller Sin City.
On his few forays into late-night talk (one visit with David Letterman
sticks in my mind), the host would breathe a sigh of relief to find
Rourke roguishly charming; the bull hadn’t demolished the china. But
mostly his rep kept him MIA. When he came up for the role of Randy, he
recalled in Venice, Aronofsky told him: “You’re a really great actor, and you’ve just f–ked up your career for 15 years and nobody wants to hire you.”

I’ve written a lot lately about how the big action pictures have not
just more bang for the buck but a higher movie intelligence than a lot
of the highly praised indie films. The techies are the auteurs now, and
they can make the most fantastic creature look and feel real. Well,
Rourke here is his own special effect monster, his own Incredible Hulk.
(It’s the rare movie where the closing credits for Makeup and Mr.
Rourke’s Trainer are well deserved.) Reviewers love watching actors
abuse their bodies for their art almost as much as actors love doing
it. That’s one reason Mickey should be a guest of honor at the year-end
critics’ awards dinners. Another is that Rourke’s bio blends with the
story of The Wrestler,
but with a happier ending. His career has come back from the dead; any
award would be like a posthumous prize to someone who is, miraculously,
still around to accept it.

The real cause for celebration is that he alchemizes the dross
of the script into a character with a palpable physicality and inner
life. Behind the bulk of his hulk, a man’s dogged decency is on
display, and so, briefly, is Rourke’s fallen-angel smile. In the scene
that could cinch his Oscar nomination, he gets a long closeup as Randy
pours out his clumsy love for his daughter. The speech is boilerplate
sentiment, which the actor elevates to a passion as sweet as it is
forlorn. If Rourke had to punish himself to look the part of a battered
fighter so he could slip inside Randy’s wounded innocence, then, man,
it was worth it.

So even someone like me, who knows in his bones that The Wrestler
is bogus, can cheer the return of Mickey Rourke. And not because it’s
nice that he seems to have turned his life around and focused again on
doing what he once did so well, but because the best writers and
directors might have to put Rourke on the short list of actors up for
great roles. The man from the past has a future again.