Shuffling along in an iPod world

Happy 5th birthday to the iPod.

I was kind of slow to get on the bandwagon, mostly because it was (and still is, although not as much) so damned expensive to join the iPod club.

But like a lot of people, once I got the thing, I was hooked. It’s a cliche to say it but I’ll say it anyway: it changed the way I listen to music, both because it allows me to shuffle through thousands of songs of all genres throughout an entire century of recorded music, and because I can carry all that tunage wherever I go and have private access to the sound library, and not have to listen to the traffic/street noise/supermarket Muzak/lawn mower/sounds of nature. Continue reading

It wasn’t so long ago…

CNN this week ran this Associated Press story, about how musicians who’ve been holdouts from the iPod/iTunes bandwagon — the Beatles, Led Zep, Garth Brooks and others among them — will probably cave in and finally allow their music to be downloaded song-by-song.

Apple’s iPod dominates the digital music player market, and iTunes accounts for over 70 percent of the (legal) digital music market. Meanwhile, CD sales have been dropping steadily. The era of the compact disc is over, it seems. Continue reading

Welcome to my playlist … on shuffle

Here’s the best description I’ve read yet about the “Jack FM” format — a hodgepodge of album oriented and hit songs from the past two, maybe three decades played up in no particular order. The stations that feature the format (Denver’s Jack 105.5 FM was the first station in the U.S. to adopt the format, which was birthed in Canada) typically use taglines that state something like, “Music we like,” or “Playing what we want.” Continue reading

Tuning in to the tiny screen

I love how smart Apple is with its line of iPods, and more important, the content it makes available for iPods. I got a video iPod for Christmas (good thing, since my 40GB 4th generation iPod is filled up with over 11,000 songs), and in addition to putting all my classical music and odds and ends like podcasts on the thing, I’ve been putting videos on it. Continue reading

“Material Girl” upgraded

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I wrote a rhapsodic review of Madonna.

I thought back then that she was a perfect encapsulation of American consumerism, and though that’s kind of an icky concept, I thought she was special because her music was so good. She captures (or at least back then, captured) the American “zeitgeist” (sorry to use such a geek crit-term, but it’s a good one) with pure pop for all people. Anyone who didn’t like her music were just plain high-culture snobs or didn’t have an ounce of humor and/or rhythm in their bones. Continue reading