This Christmas, I entered the 21st century -- or, more
precisely, was given an iPod, which is essentially one and the
same. Small, portable digital media players haven't quite reached
the universal status of the cell phone but Apple has sold some 42
million units of the iPod since its release in 2001. In my circles,
it seems to be fast approaching indoor plumbing as a staple of
modern convenience.
The appeal is easy to understand. The iPod and its competitors
make the old Sony Walkman or even a portable CD player seem like
lugging around a huge old-fashioned tape recorder by comparison.
The headphones are too small to attract unwanted attention. The
hustle and bustle of the daily commute doesn't cause much skipping
or otherwise interrupt the music flow. You can easily alternate
between tracks, quickly switching from sleepy acoustic
singer-songwriters to thumping hip-hop beats as your mood
dictates.
Yet I've long resisted the iPod's siren song and if it weren't
for the Christmas present, I doubt I would have owned one anytime
soon. It's not because of any latent Luddite tendencies -- I come
from an IT
background and spend most of my day on the computer. Nor was it
sticker-shock from the price of the little gadget, now quite
competitive with other media. It's just that the whole process of
downloading music, to be listened to on my laptop or on an MP3
player, seems a bit... well, wrong.
Not because of Napster-style patent disputes. I'm not sure where
I come down on the internal libertarian debate over intellectual property, but it's hard to
feel sympathy for pop stars and record companies raking in the
millions from overpriced CDs and concert tickets. Ask me to choose
sides between a few college kids strapped for tuition or beer money
who want to download music from their buddy Poindexter's server and
Metallica, those poor and thirsty college
students are going to win every time.
But digital music downloads ignore and even do violence to
important parts of the music-fan experience. Music, in my view,
isn't just something to be listened to. Music is something to
collect. I have a four-foot tower of CDs in my bedroom with a few
dozen outliers sitting on my kitchen counter. I own several cases
of cassettes -- remember those? -- a couple hundred vinyl LPs and,
buried somewhere in my parents' home, a few eight-track cartridges.
And for true collectors, this represents a pitifully meager
selection.
Not only is it difficult to fathom the possibility that for all
the time, space and money I wasted collecting now-obsolete
recordings, I could have reserved just a fraction of my hard drive
space. Where does collecting factor into our digital media music
craze? Twenty years from now, is anybody going to be admiring your
Black
Eyed Peas audio files?
When I visit friends and relatives, one of my favorite
activities is to peruse their record collections. If they have
anything interesting, questions ensue. Oh, you have the
limited-edition two-LP Something/Anything? by Todd
Rundgren, with the one blue record and the one red record? You have
Roy Orbison 45s or the old Readers' Digest swing-music box
sets? Some early, digitally remastered CD reissues of the Beatles
U.S. albums?
Looking through someone's assembled records and CDs tells you
something interesting about their tastes and, in some cases, their
lives. It's edifying to learn where a cousin got his autographed
copy of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde signed. Sitting at a
friend's computer to browse through his MP3s, on the other hand,
feels more like scanning a soon-to-be-fired employee's C drive for
pornography.
Shuffling through someone's digital media playlist is only
slightly more satisfying. These are all isolated songs that they
may have heard once somewhere, without any knowledge of the artist
who recorded them or reference to the albums from which they came.
A 22-year-old with all of Queen's CDs is someone with refined, if
somewhat unorthodox, tastes. A 22-year-old with "Bohemian Rhapsody"
on her iPod is someone who once saw Wayne's World.
Yes, I know these kinds of fuddy-duddy complaints have been
bandied about by old-school fans with each new technological
innovation. Stars of the silver screen feared that television would
ruin entertainment. The Buggles wrongly sang that "Video Killed the
Radio Star."
Eventually people were going to stop all those expensive
full-length albums with only one or two good songs on them, or
those greatest-hits packages missing just enough of the artist's
best-loved tunes to force fans to buy another album or two. A few
years after the introduction of the CD, nobody missed the
eight-track player. Perhaps we're not far from the day when CDs are
consigned to a similar fate.
In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy playing with my iPod. And
maybe get that old turntable working again.
topics:
Television
