Audio

RIP Rio

08.26.05 | Comments

Buying an MP3 player was a surprisingly difficulty decision for me. I knew I didn’t want an iPod, and I knew I wanted a player that was atleast 20GB, but even given those prerequisites choosing a player is still mighty difficult. Last week I settled on the Rio Karma, primarily because it was much cheaper than the other choice (the Cowon iAudio X5). I got the player on Thursday, and I’m fairly certain that it was love at first sight for me and my Karma. Then today it was announced that Rio is dead. Just like that.

So the question has to be asked, what went wrong? It wasn’t for lack of a decent product, both the Rio Karma and Carbon have serious advantages over their iPod counterparts. Although Rio was stupid not to release a successor to their excellently reviewed Karma last season, the release of the Carbon almost made up for that loss. The big problem with Rio, and this is true for any company that tries to take on Apple, was in their marketing. Simply put, there really wasn’t any.

While Rio may have been the first company to release a mass-market MP3 player, it was Apple that made the whole digital audio player thing trendy, and it was Apple that conquered the world with their oh-so-hip marketing. Remember, this is the company that made people drool for a screenless flash MP3 player. Who else can do that?! Rio just failed to compete on the same scale as Apple, and they relied too much on the techy userbase instead of appealing to the generic end-user. Sure you could buy a Carbon at Best Buy, but where were the commercials and magazine ads telling you why you should? Maybe someone can eventually resurrect the Rio brand and do the name justice. Until then, the Rio fan base will most likely move to the Cowon players. They have a good portion of the market in Korea, so it doesn’t matter as much to them if they aren’t as popular in America.


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