A while back, I wrote about digging out my iPod (and the charger!) and loading on a lot of music for the trip to Ottawa. Then I also used it on trips to Pittsburgh and Atlanta. In Pittsburgh I was very pleased to see there was an iPod alarm clock/charging station (haven't seen one of those in a long, long time), which was great because I hadn't brought the charger along.
While the actual technology in the iPod is fine, the economic model behind it has pretty much collapsed. People basically decided they wanted to stream music rather than pay for downloads, which could then be loaded onto an iPod. As people stopped carrying iPods around (and mostly streamed music on their phones) all the support structures for iPods vanished pretty quickly.
As it turns out, I actually have an iPod mini with around 4 GB storage. That's a lot of music, but only a fraction of what some of the other iPods can hold. While I don't spend a lot of time swapping the music in and out, I have done it occasionally.
Originally, this was my wife's iPod, and it had mostly New Wave music from the 80s, along with some 80s/90s groups. Then I inherited after she moved over to streaming.
I left on the New Wave music and added 54-40 and the Greatest Hits by the Jam, and probably Paul Simon's Graceland and more U2, including The Joshua Tree, and some classical, most notably Glenn Gould's classic recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. This is primarily what I listened to back and forth from Ottawa.
Somewhere along the way, the settings were corrupted, and I had to do a factory reset. I assumed that the music would be left on. Wrong! So I had to rebuild the library. This time around, I dropped almost everything but the New Wave hits. I then added quite a few jazz albums by Andrew Hill and Bobby Hutcherson, plus The 49th Parallel by Neil Swainson.
That gave me very little room to play with, though I added a fair bit of Camper van Beethoven, Local H and some very selected cuts from Depeche Mode, Suzanne Vega and U2.
As I have gotten use to the new order (and I really wish I had the room for any New Order songs!), I decided there were some specific songs I wanted to add: Peter Murphy's Cuts You Up, Iggy Pop's Lust for Life, XTC's Dear God, 54-40's Blame Your Parents, Jane's Addition's Been Caught Stealing and Minstry's NWO. This was pretty solid, though I ultimately wanted to add just a bit more funk: Brick House, Super Freak and Papa's Got a Brand New Bag. Of course, for every one of these songs I added, I had to pull off an obscure one-hit wonder song. But I think the balance is pretty good for the time being. I'll go on keeping on with my obsolete technology until it wears out and just stops working.
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