Birth of an Industry: IPod Loading
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: January 23, 2005
IT sounds like a line from a spam e-mail: Work from home! Low risk! Flexible schedule! Earn hundreds of dollars each gig!
But an emerging group of resourceful entrepreneurs says there is no catch. The rising popularity of Apple's sleek iPod has created a new niche service: the professional iPod loader. There are housekeepers to tend homes and gardeners to tend landscaping. Why not iPod loaders to take care of music collections?
For $1 to $1.49 a CD, the professional loaders will embark on the time-consuming process of copying a music collection onto an iPod, often providing a digital backup copy as well....
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The loaders say they are finding growing demand, especially after the holiday season, which increased the number of iPods sold to 10 million. Consumers are realizing that the digital wonder that was supposed to unify and simplify their musical existence actually eats up time, lots of it. Converting enough CD's to fill a 40-gigabyte iPod can take 60 to 100 hours, depending on the computer's speed. "The prospect of spending all this time was daunting," said Nell Eckersley, a 35-year-old educator in Brooklyn, who was excited when she received an iPod for Christmas. Then she began converting her collection of 400 CD's. "I spent all day Sunday doing it, and said, `This is crazy,' " she said....
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Loading iPods is appealing because it is low risk, requires relatively little overhead and can be done from home or work. The only thing that is required is a relatively up-to-date computer and some computer knowledge. Marketing can be done on the cheap: online through the site Craigslist.com and Google, offline through neighborhood fliers and word of mouth....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/jobs/23IPOD.html 
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