I’ve sort of talked about this subject before, but hey, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet. My bonnet, as it happens, has served as temporary accomodation for numerous bees over the years, and this is just another one. So.
I understand why people would want an iPod shuffle. It’s relatively cheap, at least for an iDevice, it’s small, and it enables you to carry around a bunch of music to listen to with a minimum of fuss. Nevertheless, I hate the iPod Shuffle and everything it stands for.
The standard way to listen to an iPod Shuffle is just to load a bunch of songs onto it and then you listen to them in random order, skipping any time you don’t want to listen to a song. I believe there’s a way to listen to songs in a linear fashion, but compared to other devices it’s far from ideal for that purpose. I will be the first to admit that I spend quite a lot of time listening to my mp3 player on random, but it concerns me that there is a market for a device that makes it difficult for you to do anything other than listen on random.
Why would that bother me? My worry is that it’s becoming so much less likely that people will hear songs in context with the songs around it, in an order that was chosen by the people that made/compiled the music. People who sequence albums talk about how they agonise over the track order. Even if you have ever made a mixtape for someone, you’ll understand the pleasure of figuring out the exact order you want those songs to hit. Should we stop caring?
It’s true that none of this is essential to music. Here Comes The Sun is a great song whichever way you look at it. But it’s an even better song at the end of of the abruptly cut-off stormclouds of I Want You (She’s So Heavy) on the first side of Abbey Road. Some might argue that it was even better still when you had to stand up, turn the record over and drop the needle yourself in order to get the sun to appear (though I’m not sure I’d go so far.) And let’s not even talk about what the ‘random’ button does to the second half of that album.
I think there are a few signs that people want to bring human interaction back into the process of listening to music. An understanding that, despite what Pandora aspires to, we can’t rely on a machine alone to tell us what music to listen to. The shared playlists of Spotify, and the take-turns to DJ concept of turntable.fm are examples. The latter in particular is a great idea, although it currently has my ire for encouraging this culture of skipping whatever doesn’t immediately sit within our comfort zone, or entertain us RIGHT NOW.
If you are someone who truly appreciates music then perhaps you should be questioning whether it’s always appropriate to treat your collection as if it’s a series of interchangeable pellets of sound that can just be fired at your ears with no thought to order or context. And if you’d like to hear a great piece of music being made right now that defies attempts to cut it up and move it around, you could do far worse than listening to I Come To Shanghai’s Eternal Life, Vol. 1 just released.
