A new technological blunder was unveiled recently when the SanDisk company announced the launch of the Slot-Music Card. A microSD storage card which will come pre-loaded with an album of mp3 files, cover art and liner notes from artists from Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner Music.

The cards will be carried in a variety of major retailers including Best Buy and Wal-Mart and playable in microSD enabled cell phones and mp3 players.

My first thought on this news was “Gee whiz, this is a big announcement!”

Unfortunately, I had a second thought and it went something like “I can think of no rational reason for a consumer to purchase this item.”

I have a microSD card in my Blackberry. It’s ridiculously small. I’m pretty sure if I ever needed to load it into a more common SD card reader like a computer or mp3 player I would have to put it into one of the two (or maybe both) adapters that came with the card. Obviously, this has never been much of a concern because I’ve kept the same 2 GB card inside the phone since I got it and am able to transfer files back and forth through the magic of a USB cable.

By no means do I have a desire to stockpile these little cards or have to switch them out every time I want to change the music I’m listening to. Currently, thanks to the brilliant technology of the SanDisk company, I don’t have to because I can download an album of mp3 files, cover art and liner notes from multiple artists and store them on my microSD card.

I probably shouldn’t call this a technological blunder, because there’s really no new technology involved. This is basically an artist-branded SD card or the same thing that’s on the shelf right now at Best Buy or Wal-Mart, but will have your favorite artists image decorating the packaging instead of the not-so-sexy SanDisk logo.

The major labels are now hedging their bets on selling a storage card for use in devices purchased solely for their storage capacity. Why would someone that just purchased a 16 GB mp3 player want to spend more money for a little card they have to insert into the mp3 player instead of downloading the music and storing it on the mp3 player itself? Isn’t that a little bit contradictory? Is there a large consumer demand for liner notes I’m unaware of?

This thing makes the laser disc look good.

To top it off, SanDisk announced they’re hoping to have the Slot-Music Card on store shelves in time for the holidays and hope to have a whopping 29 albums available for sale.

These labels would have a better shot trying to sell vinyl.