iPod mania and the future of music

You know the concept: carry your entire music collection in your pocket. Listen to hip-hop… You know the concept: carry your entire music collection in your pocket. Listen to hip-hop next to ragtime, Madonna next to Sage Francis, the Minutemen next to Kylie Minogue. As a college student, you should already know all about iPods, not because you obsessively own or covet one of those purdy little digital jukeboxes but because Apple’s marketing has been impeccable, and you are their target market.

A few days before the rush of Christmas Eve, news came that many retailers had simply run out of iPods, surely leaving a few anxious consumers rabidly searching the Web for their would-be stocking stuffers. Needless to say, Apple’s iPod was the most talked-about, drooled-over and eagerly desired item for gift-getters this past holiday season – a credit to its fantastic ad campaign, which, in a USA Today consumer report, was found to be “very effective” by about 20 percent of consumers. I was certainly a sucker for it, and, for once, I didn’t mind.

As much as Apple’s advertising deserves its due credit, it would be nothing if the iPod weren’t, in actuality, a revolutionary, ridiculously convenient and socially significant piece of technology. The fact that it exists speaks volumes about the direction in which music is heading: an age when the LP may become a tired and obsolete musical form, when single songs or very small collections of songs may dominate music sales.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the iTunes Music Store for a second. Right now, Apple is hoping that the total downloaded song count will hit 100 million by this April, already having tolled in at about 30 million downloads since iTunes became available for Windows users. At 99 cents a song, that’s no figure to scoff at.

While the Recording Industry Association of America bounces from campus to campus, scaring students into uninstalling Kazaa from their various desktops, Apple has provided a legal option for downloading music – an option that people have obviously taken to.

I do suppose there are some downsides to the iTunes music store, too. Though touting a library of some 500,000 songs, it’s pretty useless when it comes to finding any obscure, independent music. File-sharing programs, then, are the only option for finding such music – aside, of course, from buying the actual CDs, God forbid!

But, as I’ve already suggested, buying CDs may soon become a thing of the past. Of course, I’m not the first person to think of this. Obviously, such a fear is ultimately what drove Metallica into the courtroom during the Napster hullabaloo, and what led the RIAA to their new campaign of terror. The only difference in the way I see it is that I don’t think there’s anything to be scared about – the music industry has changed before and it will change again. The only difference is that, this time, the change in technology wasn’t instituted by the industry itself, as it was with the introduction of cassettes and CDs.

It astounds me that it took so damned long for the music industry to really understand the financial potential of downloading, spending its time, rather, by squirming around and trying to eradicate file-sharing as though it were a virus on the rump of the industry – not the growth of a new, strong arm

In terms of technological phenomena, downloading music is still a somewhat new and exciting process – the novelty of it has yet to wear off. As Chuck Klosterman pointed out in his article “Tear Down the Internet!,” printed in Spin Magazine this past October, the very process of downloading music, the invigoration of acquiring music so quickly and painlessly, may be more exciting for people than actually listening to the music they get. He says, “I assume there were dudes in 1793 who simply thought using the cotton gin was way cool, even if they never cared how many pairs of trousers it enabled them to own.”

Once the novelty wears off, the real impact of downloading on the way musicians create, package and promote their music will be shown, and I feel as though that’s something to be excited about. People look at the record album as though it were integral to our concept of reality. For us, it’s something that’s always been there. Inasmuch as we listen to, and love, albums that were made before our respective birth dates, we should keep in mind that the idea of a record album was created at some point. In the same sense, there are endless possibilities for us to create new ways to present music, and I’m looking forward to seeing – and hearing – it happen.