Me & My iPod

A colleague of mine recently told me about his plans to buy a 32 GB iPod Touch so he could load all of his music on it.  All of his music? An iPod of that size would not have nearly enough storage to hold all of my music, and this friend is a serious music fan who — to be polite — has been listening to music a lot longer than me.

“How can you possibly get all of your music on an iPod that size?”, I asked.

“I don’t rip the CDs that I never listen to, and I don’t rip all of the songs on every CD.”

As he explained further, I began to realize that he basically used his iPod to listen to music in just about the same way that he did before he had an iPod — it was just a different medium for listening to music: he saw it as a replacement for the CD, just as the CD had replaced tape and just as tape had replaced vinyl.

That inspired me to begin to think about how dramatically the iPod and digital music has changed how I enjoy my music collection.  First let’s return to my buddy’s process of culling his music library prior to ripping his CDs.  Had I done that, I would never have rediscovered tons of great music from more than two decades of collecting CDs.  The most outstanding example is Anthology, the greatest hits of Sly & the Family Stone.  I probably hadn’t popped that CD into my player in more than 10 years.  But one day ‘Everyday People’ just happened to show up during a random song shuffle on my iPod, and now Sly shows up just about every week in my play lists.  That just wouldn’t have happened without the iPod.

The iPod has also made it easier for me to sample and buy new music.  For example, the music recommendation engines used by the digital music stores have led me to some terrific music.  As a fan of Elvis Costello and Lyle Lovett, iTunes and Amazon began to recommend the music of John Hiatt.  I downloaded a few songs by Hiatt and quickly got hooked on his stuff.  Again, this is not really possible with traditional music stores.  To a lesser extent I have also pulled into some of my wife’s music into my regular rotation — I probably never would have grabbed one of her CDs, but it was not a big deal to bring in a few Aimee Mann or Annie Lennox tracks into my play lists.

I could go on and on, but I’ll finish up with how the iPod has opened up the world non-musical audio.  I listen to a lot of podcasts — news and tech mostly.  Podcasts, obviously, would not be feasible without the marriage of broadband Internet, RSS, and portable digital audio players.  I also have begun listening to a lot of old time radio on my iPod.  I’m sure that Jack Benny had no idea back in the 1930′s that I would be able to store three decades worth of his programs on a gadget the size of a deck of cards (with room to spare).

So if you are using your iPod the same way that you used the 8-track player in your old Pinto, you’re really missing out.