Music, music everywhere

Tom Coates has posted the first two articles in a series he’s using to lay out his thoughts on what he calls ‘The New Musical Functionality’ - the effect on our music-listening habits of massively more capable portable players, wireless connectivity and the internet as a means of allowing users to share not just music files, but details of their listening habits. Tom’s articles are characteristically thoughtful pieces, exploring the implications of all this technology without getting tangled up (so far) in the intractable debate about intellectual property rights and digital music.

One point in his latest post jumped right out at me:

The reason that people are buying iPods is because they want 10,000 songs in their pockets. They want access to music wherever they are in the world. More still - they want access to all their music everywhere. Every last bit. Every last place.

That’s what’s prodding me in the direction of buying an iPod. I only developed a practical interest in digital music when I bought my iMac a bit more than a year ago; my previous PC didn’t even have a soundcard, and as someone who only got their first Walkman about seven or eight years ago and made only intermittent use of it I was never all that bothered about listening to music on the move. Part of the problem was that I found it frustrating to have to carry round a bunch of tapes if I wanted to listen to more than one album while I was out. Once I got my iMac all set up I was keen to use iTunes to turn it into a jukebox, and it so happened that the Palm Tungsten T I bought not long afterwards had a slot for a Secure Digital memory card which could be used not just to back up my PDA’s files but also to hold MP3s. The obvious next step was to copy an album or two of MP3s over. That’s what hooked me, but also frustrated me: it’s a pain to have to upload a new set of tracks over a USB link periodically, so I’m very keen to put all my music (a comparatively paltry 10GB-worth of MP3s, ripped at 160kbps) on a single portable device. Having made that decision, the next step is an obvious one…

Where my vision of my portable listening device diverges from the future Tom envisions is that I have no use for a wireless MP3 player. I’m aiming to buy a 20GB iPod, which is likely to provide ample space for my music collection for quite a few years to come. So why buy disk space I don’t need? Because I find the idea of backing up my iMac to a portable Firewire drive which just happens to be highly portable and to contain all my music too is just irresistible. Unless the music industry manages to force music listeners to use some godawful streamed music format in place of MP3/AAC/WMA or whatever I can see little reason to care whether my iPod is networked, as long as my iMac is.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling about my musical needs. The main point of my post is to suggest that everyone with an interest in the future of digital music keep up with Tom’s posts on the subject.