I admittedly have gone over to the streaming side. While I
have often enjoyed the aural wallpaper of Pandora, it wasn’t until I ponied up
my $10 a month for Spotify that the game was over. For years I would easily
spend way more than $10 a month on CDs, or later downloads. As a result, I came
up with quite a collection of music. Some of this I put into iTunes to listen
to on my various iPods. I’ve owned a number of these. An early one couldn’t
hold much, replaced by a nice big one that almost held all I wanted, replaced
(on death of its predecessor) by the biggest classic Apple ever sold, which remains unfilled, but
with roughly 16,000 songs, manages to keep us entertained (or royally
aggravated) in most tab rooms. Mostly my old classic is the supplier of my car
entertainment. While I listen to audiobooks in the car via my phone and
Bluetooth, music comes from a direct hookup of the iPod to the car’s music
player. Usually I listen to music randomly sorted. 16,000 songs means that
fairly often something pops up that I haven’t heard in a while, or for that
matter, I can’t ever remember hearing. I mean, it got into my iTunes library
somehow, but if it isn’t one of those rogue U2 albums, I’m not necessarily sure
how. Which, of course, makes driving life interesting.
I’ve been Spotifying only since January, and I do it only
where there’s wifi. Obviously this includes the chez, but not yet my car. I
haven’t tried to use it while driving, so I have no idea if the connection
holds, or if data use is too expensive, or for that matter, if I would have
been better off saving the tracks for later, which is an option. Since, as I say, I shuffle while
driving, or drive while shuffling, whichever is more accurate, grabbing just an
album or two usually wouldn’t do the job. At home, on the other hand, I’m way
more inclined to listen to whole albums from start to finish, with the tracks
in the order God made them to be listened to. If you’re going to listen to
“Oklahoma,” you don’t want “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” to be the second to
last track. The older an album gets, the more likely a lot of thought went into
track arrangement, at least with some artists. Albums were the medium. Albums
were presented in a certain way. For that matter, I’m pretty sure that when
Beethoven wrote his 7th Symphony, he wanted the Allegretto to come 2nd in the
lineup. He wasn't that deaf!
Anyhow, as I said, I have gone over to streaming, and
Spotify, big time. I have discovered more music in the last 6 months than I
would have thought possible, in all manner of genres. I have dug up albums I
didn’t know existed from groups I always loved. I have found performers of
classical and jazz and fado and tropicalia and gypsy and blues and rock that I
had never heard of, or in some cases even imagined. I have gone hog wild
creating playlists, which honestly I’m using more as bookmarks for albums I
want to listen to again than actual lists to listen to at some point. And best of all, I am intrinsically protected from having
to listen to Taylor Swift, a benefit many music lovers would kill for. On the other
hand, I do miss having Beatle music, but to be honest, I have all their albums
on every other device I own, including my toaster, so that doesn’t matter all
that much.
I have argued at length with some people who won’t even
download music, much less go over to streaming. I maintain that the people with
whom I’ve had these arguments do not have the hearing chops to claim that the
problem is mp3s. I mean, if they were true audiophiles, they would pooh-pooh
CDs, which are a poor relation to analog LPs. The issue isn’t really quality,
though, as much as the virtue of ownership vs the virtue of untethered
listenership. I already own too many CDs. More than too many isn’t going to
hack it. Of course, there is more music on Spotify than I will ever get to, but
I can live with there being more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my
music appreciation. (I’m assuming Apple’s new music service has the same
backlog of every album in the universe too, as do probably a bunch of others,
so I’m not pushing one service over; I have all my music backed up to Amazon
and I have access to Prime’s music, which is nowhere near as deep as Spotify’s
but which, obviously, is one of the places I have my Beatles albums.)
I bring all this up because of the introduction of the new
iPod Touch. I have no interest in it as anything other than an iPod, but it’s
nice to see a 128er out there. You can pack probably 20K songs easy, plus a
couple of apps (like Spotify). And what’s especially nice is you can hook it up
in the car when your old iPod (inevitably) dies. Of course, maybe by then I’ll
have smart enough music in the car to be able to just listen to Spotify without
any complications. At which point I’ll be selling my old iPod, filled with
great music, to the highest bidder.
Any offers?
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