Last spring I was out hiking and there was this amazing argument between a young red-tailed hawk and a bunch of crows. I guess they were fighting over a tree perch or something. And I was the only one who got to hear it because everyone else on the trail was hooked into their iPods.

Okay maybe arguments between birds happen all the time and people don't have to hear every single one.

But I just can't imagine going out in nature and only wanting to look and not wanting to listen.

I have only recently joined the iPod Nation, and rarely even use my new Nano. That being said, I have thought a lot about it and the effect it could potentially have on my relationship with music and the way music is created and marketed.

I think iTunes is almost as influential as the iPod itself. The ability to buy only those songs you really like on an album renders the very concept of albums almost dead. Sure, we've been able to mix-and-match our music on tapes and, more recently, recordable CDs for years. What iTunes does, though, is create an entirely new marketplace for music, and with it a new paradigm for what commercial music is and how it is sold. As more and more people purchase their music digitally, will musicians continue to bother with albums? Why not just release a new song every few weeks? Hardly anyone does concept albums anymore, making most albums just the latest collection of an artist's work. Sure, the songs are usually recorded all in the same time period using the same musicians, and often they were all written in the same period, so there is bound to be a certain connection between the songs on an album, however tenuous. But there are ways to recognize the connections between songs other than lumping them all together on an album. How about releasing songs as they are finished and simply saying this group of songs belongs to a cycle of songs having to do with this or that theme, idea, or what have you.

My basic question is: If you can buy songs one at a time and manipulate their order and mix them with songs by other artists, what exactly is an album anymore?

I can't believe you wrote a three page article about a little white machine created to make money and keep people coming back for more brand worship.

An article about how Steve Jobs/ Apple will or should tackle the problem of high concentrations lead in his machines would be more worthy.

The ipod has impacted the way local communities who assemble (or strip) these little miracle machines fare in with regards to their health.

Ipod: Half the features for twice the money! Built-in obsolescence! 100% proprietary! Designed so a retarded monkey can use it! Fragile and disposable! No sharing! Requires external software to use! Terrible battery life!

Five minutes of research should lead you away from this 8-track player. There are choices.

Once upon a time, the recorded-music industry was based on "singles" - first on 78 rpm, then 45. They were played on low-tech machines called "phonographs." An artist made one two-sided single, released it in hopes of its becoming a hit, and if magic happened, made another until time and/or luck ran out.

Then came a new century, and after a brief flirtation with something called "the album," the recorded-music industry again became enamored of "singles." They are now played on high-tech toys with a variety of sci-fi-sounding names. Artists release them into "cyberspace" in hopes of enough listners "downloading" them to create a new "hit" and affording the artist to take another chance.

Has what went around really come around...to this?

Farhad Manjoo's excellent piece on the iPod perfectly captures my own feelings (both good and bad) about this genius technology. I bought my first iPod (a 2GB Nano) this past July, and it is no exaggeration to say that it has changed my life. Nevertheless, I agree with Manjoo's criticism that the iPod renders the listening of new music, in the form of a CD, problematic. If Manjoo's story were a CD that I could download onto my iPod, I'd still enjoy shuffling its separate paragraphs (like songs), but I'd miss the overall flow and tone of a well-developed piece that is both celebratory and somewhat lamentable (sort of like Beck's "Sea Change" CD). The kick-ass fun of iPod shuffling aside, the whole is still more than the sum of its parts.

i've never owned a consumer good that has been everything i wanted it to be. but the ipod is as close as i've come. i'm not even sure that something that is "perfect" makes sense in a consumerist culture - i too have owned 4 ipods, because each is successively better than the last. if it was perfect out of the gate, apple would have lost out on another $1000 from me. might be frustrating, but i don't blame them. i thank them for their attention to detail and asthetic and for giving me something that truly enhances my day-to-day life. and i'm stoked to learn that i share a birthday with my favorite non-living thing in the world.

Now that the author has finished regaling us with the details of his ever so hip and eclectic taste in music, perhaps we can get back to the point of the article.

I was a very early adopter of hard drive and flash mp3 players, and I've owned WAY too many over the years than is good for me. The author is giving far too much credit to Jobs and Apple when, in reality, the changes to our relationship with music stem entirely from the advent and widespread adoption of the mp3 format (and subsequent formats). There is absolutely nothing unique about the ipod that contributes particularly to the effect that is the central point of the article. Even mp3 players with godawful user interfaces and form factors (creative nomad jukebox 3, anyone?) have the exact same impact on their users. And if the ipod hadn't come along, audio players would still be just as ubiquitous as they are today - market share would just be divided differently.

If you really must lionize someone for the evolution of our relationship to music, the inventors of the mp3 format and the early adopters who wrote software to make managing their music easier are the folks who made the ipod eventually possible. I can remember using grip (linux cd ripper) to automatically populate a database with the details of every track I ripped and then building my own interfaces into that library that, to this day, surpass the usability (in the context of my own unique requirements, of course) of any other music manager.

Meanwhile, apple are the single most dominant influence on the adoption, by almost every company in the industry, of closed/undocumented formats and protocols which bind a user to their tech platform while simultaneously limiting the kind access we have to our music. When iTunes (or windows media player, or real, or...) is the only player which can play your songs, you are stuck with a limited ability to reinvent the way you interact with your library. It's Steve's way or the highway. Hell, just yesterday I spent 6 hours attempting to figure out how to extract the genre of a track encoded by iTunes and never did succeed. I can get every other tag, but not genre. It doesn't appear to be documented anywhere, and those who have figured it out all seem to be capitalizing on their knowledge by selling a product rather than providing access.

If you really want solutions to your perceived problems with the ipod, then breaking Apple's stranglehold on future development of music player interface is crucial. Apple is bound by their shareholders to produce a player that caters to the lowest common denominator of functionality, and those of us who'd like alternative interfaces and usability are left out in the cold.

I couldn't agree more that the way we interact with music these days is, in some aspects, inferior to how we used to. Losing the context of the entire album when listening to a song, and having an attention span shorter than a single song are problems that can be solved with good interface design, if only someone were interested in catering to the tiny minority of us who actually care about such things. I'd happily suffer a couple of extra buttons on my ipod if it meant I could restart an album from track 1 and play it in order with the touch of a single button when a song that piques my interest shows up in shuffle mode. And an easy to use queueing system would not only allow you to pick that next song while finishing out the first, but it would offer an opportunity for the player to learn about your perception of relationships between songs and do a far better job than pure shuffle mode of delivering a soundtrack to your life.

So while I can appreciate the ipod as my preferred mobile audio player, by no means do I give credit to apple for making my morning commute more entertaining. The folks who created mp3, in a spirit that is fundamentally the opposite of apple's, made the specification for their format completely open to the public so that anyone with the necessary skills could access it are the ones responsible for the music revolution that is going on now. Without them, mp3 would never have taken off the way it had, and we might well not have seen the changes to our relationship to music, both good and bad, that we have.