The Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece this morning on whether the iPod has ruined music. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to put it—for those are those that believe that compression (as in MP3s or AACs) ruins music. What the article posits is that the iPod has ruined the listening experience.
The basic premise of the article is this: In the “old days”, you couldn’t carry your music with you (or if you could, you could only carry a limited amount with you). Thus you would coordinate special times to just sit and listen to your albums. You would listen to them, you would read the album artwork, and you would savor the music. He talks about how listening to music used to be a concerted sonic and emotional event, and that rather than being a problem, the inconvenience was part of the whole point. You had to create special time to listen to your records, you had an involved process to listen to the songs, including thumbing through your collection, putting the record on the turntable and then setting the needle down with the utmost care. But as for today, he believes that the ease with which we can hear any song at any moment we want no matter where we are (and often for free) has diluted the very act of listening, rendering it just another channel on our ever-expanding dial of distractions.
I’m going to disagree.
First, he’s blaming the wrong culprit. It wasn’t the iPod or iTunes that did this. The whole move away from the listening experience started with the cassette, which gave your music (as opposed to a DJ’s selection) the portability it never had. LPs don’t work in cars or while jogging. The cassette gave birth to the Sony Walkman, which started the devaluation. We then went to the CD, which improved the quality of the sound, but made things even more portable. It was easy to take your CD collection to work; you couldn’t do that with an LP. We had CD readers on computers (rarely did those computers that had cassette storage use the cassette to play music). So the iPod/iTunes are only the next generation of music portability.
So let’s phrase the question a different way: Did music portability destroy the listening experience? Perhaps for some, but I think the 1950s and 1960s “Hi Fidelity” techno-experience was a Playboy advertiser’s fantasy. People like music while they do things; the rhythms help settle the mind. We’ve had this ever since the days of Top 40 radio.
In fact, the iPod has made me appreciate my music collection more. As my collection grew, I found that I was listening only to perhaps 10% of the over 1500 albums I had. I was forgetting all the great music, and the undiscovered music, elsewhere in my collection. But thanks to being able to put my entire collection on my iPod (currently nearing 20,000 tracks), I’m able to listen on shuffle, and regularly rediscover music. I can now claim to listen to my entire collection, and I know (thanks to the iPod) that I’ve listened to every track in my collection at least once in the last year. Yes, it is on in the background when I work, but I also listen as I exercise and I drive the van. I regularly rediscover and enjoy my music.
So, what about you? Did the iPod “ruin” your listening experience? What are you listening to now?
P.S.: Now Facebook, that has ruined the experience. With LiveJournal, I can share with you the music I listen to as I write these posts. Facebook doesn’t seem to want to encourage sharing the knowledge of what you listen to.
