Montreal Gazette: Revolutionary Apple iPod a seismic change in the way we listen to music

“The synergy of the iPod Cult is irresistible: Last week Apple Computer announced that its quarterly profit more than doubled, due to sales of the iPod portable digital music player,” Juan Rodriguez writes for The Montreal Gazette. “Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the music fan who grew up idolizing Bob Dylan, uses music to keep his company afloat in a sea of PC clones (and maybe convert folks to Mac with ads that tease with coy irony: ‘From the makers of iPod’).”

Rodriguez writes, “Meanwhile, the company’s rip-and-play iTunes music program and store – pumping tracks over the Net for 99 cents a pop into iPods – became a model that may help save the music business in the throes of tumult over distributing music in a digital world. (iTunes Canada may be a month away, according to reports last week.) Finally, if the iPod is where music, technology and – ahem – daily life meet, it may well change the way we experience all of it.”

“Hyped as ‘the Walkman of the 21st century,’ the iPod also represents a seismic change in listening habits. While the Walkman made music seem to originate from between the listener’s ears, anyplace, anytime – a fundamental change in “hearing” after centuries of separation between musician and audience – the iPod has added vast capacity to the mix (in many cases entire CD collections),” Rodriguez writes.

“If such choice, ease of navigation and no small measure of serendipity doesn’t boggle the mind, it certainly googles it – allowing listeners to scan through songs to their heart’s content. I’ve been living with my iPod for over a year now and can attest to its cult addiction,” Rodriguez writes. “If you’re among the tens of millions of North Americans who’ve decided that music doesn’t end when you get out of college, the iPod is a little revolution. The ability to pack a truckload of sounds into a gizmo smaller and sleeker than a deck of cards offers avid students of music a treasure trove of possibilities. Because it compresses great swatches of musical time frames and eras, 1944 or 1964 or 1984 are as close at hand as 2004. In comparing styles and demarcation points, the iPod is a musical time-travel fetishist’s dream come true.”

Rodriguez writes, “The vastness of choice – the 40 GB model carries about 22 continuous days worth of music (or up to 10,000 songs) – can lead to obsessive thinking: what do I really want to hear at this particular moment in time? That’s when you turn to iPod’s most popular ancillary feature, the Shuffle mode, whereby the entire collection is randomized without repeating a title. It’s the sound of surprise that so often makes cosmic sense because, of course, you chose the music in the first place… Music speaks to the emotions, jogs you in and out of time. The iPod does nothing less than hold your psychic life in your pocket, your own private soundtrack, past, present and future. This oh-so precious personal rapport with music is mirrored by the iPod’s gentle tactile sensations – the sheer smoothness of the thing while lightly glancing a thumb or tapping on the double-crystal polymer Antarctica-white casing, palming the burnished steel back. Dialing up a tune, a jam session, a groove number, a symphony is a quick scroll on the Touch Wheel, accompanied by little Swiss-watch clicks, with each name and title recalling a mood, a statement, an emotion, a memory, a split-second size-up. ‘It’s all good,’ I find myself smugly saying.”

Rodriguez writes, “Too much of a good thing? For chronic-obsessive short-attention spans? The fetishization of music? It’s all in what you make of it. It might be fairly said that when music becomes a convenience, its power is diminished. And there is nothing like experiencing live music in the here and now. But music doesn’t need defending – only hearing – and there’s no one way to hear the music. To prescribe perimeters to listening is to fall into the kind of elitism the iPod was invented to vaporize.”

Much, much more here.