I never owned an iPod. I do not like to wear head phones. I think it’s less the discomfort of shoving something in my ears than it is a dislike of not being about to hear anything but the music. I want to have situational awareness, and dedicating my hearing 100% to music feels, to me, not all that different from wearing a blindfold. Even when blasting my stereo I can still hear the fire alarm.
So, i won’t miss the iPod, but it is significant that it only lasted thirteen years. And it totally transformed the music industry. No one buys CD’s anymore.
On the other hand, in my experience, an iTunes gift card is considered by teenagers to be one of the most impolite of gifts. Our sons have often asked for cash as compensation for an otherwise worthless gift. In fact, the only time I have ever purchased anything on iTunes was because I had been forced to fork over twenty bucks to compensate a disappointed stepson for getting a gift card for something he routinely steals via music pirating sites.
For a while, I tried to discourage this behavior because I considered the theft to be immoral, but it soon became clear to me that I was fighting a culture so normative and ubiquitous that I might as well have been fitting them for chastity belts.
Pirated music is ubiquitous, but the process has a built-in funnel effect.
The less popular something is, the less likely it is to be available for ‘free’.
So, yeah, I still spend money on music… apart from the compensating-the-artist issue.
Me too. I find stolen music to be immoral. I don’t steal music.
It’s not stealing. It’s illegal and you can argue immoral, but it’s not stealing. When you steal something, you deprive the rightful owner of it’s use and possession. When you copy, you are copying, not taking. Illegal copying is so new that we don’t have a verb for it.
you’re lucky it’s not likely that you’ll ever get to test that theory in court. try asking a lawyer what they think of it.
it’s stealing. you’re depriving everyone from the creator to the retailer of rightful income. it’s the same as if you shoplifted a physical lp, tape or cd (those are just copies too) from a brick-and-mortar store. there’s no way around it.
What’s stealing is what record companies do to the artists.
“Rightful income” I have an obligation to support them? I owe them a sale? However, if you will re-read my post, you will see that it’s not condoning illegal copying, just arguing definitions.
Also, how about Disney and others locking up classics and withdrawing them from sale? Those works or art were created by a previous generation of artists and technicians. They belong to the community now. The community can not even buy them.
I do know that this is a major complaint of mid-list writers. The publisher sits on their book, not wanting to print it because sales don’t meet their goals, but they won’t return the rights to the author so he can shop the book to a smaller house. The author gets no money. The public is deprived of the opportunity to read it.
In England, they regard our public library system as stealing because revenue does not flow back to the author/publisher. Here it is considered fair use. I really doubt if morality depends on the whim (or bribes to) amoral politicians.
BTW, I do not download music, but I have bought used CD’s which the industry also regards as stealing. When I trade in an old Chevy, am I stealing from General Motors by not junking it instead?
have you talked to a real lawyer yet?
if you didn’t create it or you don’t own it, you owe somebody compensation if you take it. it’s really that simple. everything in your reply is just a red herring.
record companies have been ripping off artists since forever, but two wrongs don’t make a right. that’s ensuring that artists get even less of the rightful income record companies owe them. it’s like not paying your restaurant bill because the wait staff don’t make enough — while stiffing the wait staff too.
your bill pays for everything keeping the restaurant open — food, dishes, mops, menus, phones, insurance, licenses, lawyers, maintenance, yada yada. as much as we all want to, we can’t really pick and choose which parts of the system we want to support. it would fall apart. and you can make up your own definition of stealing if you want but it won’t be the one being used in a court of law.
You are just not listening.
When an artist gives me the ability to pay what I want for their album, as Radiohead has done, I’ve paid more than what a CD would have cost. Besides, it’s Radiohead.
Otherwise, I procure my booty in other fashions. Immoral, thievery, whatever. I’m basically rocking a copy of a copy of a copy 1000 times over. Patent those 0s and 1s.
Hell, DVDs should be dead too. Why would I want to spend money and shelf space for something I can watch and then delete? Furthermore, with Pandora and other radio stations online, the whole point of even “owning” music is kind of absurd.
Personally, the sooner we can give up the concept of owning crap, the better. Owning things is vastly overrated, wasteful, and counter-productive.
And I’m still furious that Obama hasn’t appropriated the means of production for the proletariat.
Planned obsolescence is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism. Greatly facilitated by the penchant for the young to embrace the latest version of what’s hip or cool. And the higher the price tag, the more cool it is. Thankfully, haven’t seen any boomboxes around lately. At least frisbees and hula-hoops were cheap as fads should be.
They’re out there.
Not yet “out there.” Remains to be seen if the $300/$400 price tag for an updated boom box will make them cool again. (Hope not.)
My sister gave her grandson an iPod for his sixteenth birthday. A few months later his eleven year old brother told grandma that he wanted an iPod for Christmas. So, grandma bought one for him and began to have second thoughts when she got it home. By the time she dragged it out of the closet and asked my opinion, it was too late to return it. My first response was that reserving it for a sixteenth birthday present seemed right. On second thought, the thing would be obsolete by then.
Without planned obsolescence we’d all be stuck with high-quality functioning goods and a very stagnant rate of growth.
If we aren’t burning everything on the planet down and selling it, we are being common-law wasteful with our natural resources, dontcha know.
The iPod was dazzling to me when it made its debut. I thought it was the most remarkable thing in the world, much like the mini transistor radio Santa brought me when I was nine years old.
I love gadgets and when I would move on to new models, I would give the previous model to a son or nephew or niece. They have never gone to waste and I’ve done the same with my iPad. My sister-in-law has never had much extra cash, and I gave her my older iPad and a good digital camera to help her get her small business on better footing.
So while I’m an active consumer of electronic devices, I find good homes for them when I’m ready to move on. The iPod was and still is amazing!
Most these days just pay for subscription services.
It was never a question of lost sales, it was always a choice between illegal downloads and not getting it at all.
One of the advantages of age is a large CD collection and a larger vinyl collection. A $110 investment in a USB turntable put all of my collection onto iPod (after learning how to cue and stop them so I could go back and label them). The CDs just loaded from disk. A $40 interface plays the iPod through the cassette deck of the car.
Because the iPod was a gift from my kids, I paid Apple zero for this. Figured I’d paid the record companies once already and changing media was none of their business.
Internet archive has provided some interesting additions: George Gerswin playing Rhapsody in Blue, Sousa marches by the Sousa band from old cylinders, and some very interesting inter-war era music my wife discovered as tidbit details dropped into mystery novel set in the inter-war period.
My 16 year old has a basic phone and an ipod. He uses the ipod for almost everything, including phone calls via Facetime or Skype (wireless zones are all around us). Music is only a small part of it.
It’s a similar situation with me. I have a lot of music, which I listen to occasionally. But I store and listen to tons of podcasts, lectures and presentations. I’ve also listened to a lot of audio books. The Ipod, for me, is much more useful for those kinds of things than for music.
I listen to music when I work, and the ipod has been a valued piece of electronics since it came out. I also hate headphones and always play it through something with speakers. Of course the itouch version long ago replaced my classic, but it is still mostly a music player. I have a huge collection that I turn on shuffle, and it beats the predictability of Pandora. I am looking forward to when they release itouch 6, which I suspect will have 128G capacity.
Skype on an iPod touch was how we kept in touch with the kids at college where wifi was ubiquitous — both had cheap pay-go phones, but Skype was even cheaper.
It’s just the click wheel iPod that’s gone – the iPod Touch, the nano and the shuffle are still on sale. The nano has seemed like the best feature set for a while, anyway – it’s so small and the capacity is pretty darned high. And, of course, like Steve Jobs said when the iPhone is introduced, all of the key capabilities of the iPod are in the iPhone (and the iPad, for that matter).
My wife, like BooMan, hates earphones, but she has a nano that she uses in the car for books on tape (well, whatever they’re called now), played through the car stereo. (I’m not sure about the “can’t hear anything with the earbuds in” line, though – I’ve been listening to portable music since the Walkman, and unless you set the volume to stun, it’s not a problem to hear what’s going on around you.)
I like my old reel to reel player my self.
My tiny iPod shuffle is still the best music player when I run or use the treadmill. The small size and very simple controls are perfect.
Napster and high-speed internet signaled the end of music stores. I remember when I was a kid needing to leave the house to get a tape or a cd. How quaint.
Ultimately the mp3 format killed cds though, since we’ve basically shrunk the album down to microscopic size at the same and better quality. Having a mp3 player on every single phone in existence killed the ipod, since what the hell is the point of having something less than a phone for roughly the same price as a phone?
I wonder how much it has affected how artists approach making music. Rather than worrying about dumping out 7 mediocre songs with a couple of good-to-great songs, you can simply pop out singles and throw them onto the various mp3 stores. Hell, anymore you just upload your music onto youtube and basically get a record deal and money without having to play lot of live shows and build up a following.
Piracy: meh. You can make a perfectly reasoned argument that by downloading a copy of music that you’re stealing or depriving the record label of money, but the record industry is itself to blame for a lot of it. Wanting to force people into buying a bunch of mediocre songs just to get a couple of good songs, all for the price of almost $20, was foolish.
Had record labels realized at the time of Napster, like every teenager who used it, that this was the future, perhaps they would have created the markets for mp3s that would have filled the void making it more likely that people would purchase music and movies and digital things. Instead, they grasped that sand as tight as they could, as Kazaa and finally torrents made them irrelevant.
Their bad.
>>at the same and better quality
NOT!@@@@@
mp3’s aren’t even as good quality as CDs, which aren’t as good as decent quality analog recordings.
Ok, but it doesn’t change the fact that you can download lossless audio that is as good or better than cd quality.
I simply latched onto the ubiquitous mp3 format for ease.
.flac
Back in 2007, Steve Jobs called the iPhone “the best iPod we’ve ever made.”
On the other hand, in my experience, an iTunes gift card is considered by teenagers to be one of the most impolite of gifts.
Guess we run in different circles. You did realize that people must be buying those in droves otherwise they wouldn’t be ubiquitous in stores?
Many teens have iPhones or iPod touches. But the iTunes cards are also useful for apps for any Apple device (including software for Macs) or pretty much anything that can be downloaded.
And not all teens pirate songs – in fact it’s probably far fewer who steal music than those in your circle believe.