Everybody has their own Spotify experience but we’re all drawing from the same pool of music, which is vast but limited. Yet the iPod still has advantages over streaming, and not just the fact that it won’t pay a podcaster millions of dollars to talk nonsense about vaccines. Once smartphones got better and cheaper, and streaming destroyed downloads, the need for a separate music player evaporated. The Touch, by contrast, always struck me as a glittery dilettante which didn’t carry nearly enough music, but it was still popular with people who wanted a specialist device with more memory and battery life than an iPhone, at a fraction of the price. It is stolidly oblivious to the internet and its galaxy of distractions. I could listen to it non-stop for more than three months and never repeat a song. It is a sturdy little brick with just one job: music, and lots of it. Why was I still doing this? I didn’t know. Reprogrammed by touchscreens, my fingers found the iPod’s click wheel increasingly alien. But for boring technical reasons, the computer that housed my music could no longer handle the iTunes store, so I had to download songs on one device, transport them to another and individually add them to the library, a process which was almost as laborious as making a tape.
Even once Spotify arrived, I kept this up for years as an act of commitment: love a song, buy a song, own a song. After that, the simple drag-and-drop of an iTunes playlist felt miraculous. This required a lot of creative editing, tense retakes and hovering over the pause button like a predator. It’s a time capsule of musical memories.įor the first decade I used cassettes to make my compilations.
Every month for the past 30 years, I’ve made a compilation of my favourite songs. The news that Apple is pulling the plug on the iPod Touch, and thus the entire 21-year-old line, is curiously timed for me because I only recently retired my iPod Classic.
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