The Ipod revolution

Its unfair to say that the Ipod was revolutionary. The real credit goes to the first popular product that allowed you to take your music around with great quality. When I first started sponsoring a debate team back in the 90's the object of teenage affection was a bright yellow walkman. (The spell checker doesn't believe that walkman is is valid word.) It provided portable cassette music of good quality and an AM FM radio as well. The major drawback.. the cassette always hissed and you had two good drops and it was toast. They were pretty pricey. Tape was an issue. Along the side of the road it was not unusual to see what seemed to be a half a mile of tape sprung out of the cassette. Despite all of these they were treasured. My daughter bought one with the winnings of one of her contest speech awards. It was over $100.

The next major development was the portable CD player. At first CDs were hard to come by. They were a little hard to walk with. They were bulky and the round disc format was slippery.

They wanted over 16 dollars for a single CD. They were vulnerable to bumps as they played. They solved this by using flash memory and playing from the flash memory first. This could vary from a 3 second delay to as much as a 30 second delay. The longer the delay the more expensive the player. CDs at first were not programmable. People could not make their own mixes with them. This made the music companies pretty happy. But the march of technology rolled over the limitations. The music was digital so why couldn't it be re-recorded digitally on your own CD.

Computer CD players started to appear. primarily to move large programs on to computers. At the time all the experts said that music on a computer would not be possible. The nature of the computer CD was to download and backup more reliably the computer's hard drive not continuously play from the CD's memory. The industry pundits were wrong again. Soon we had computers recording and mixing CDs. Welcome to the major internet intrusion.

Napster. Napster allowed free interchange of your hard drives music information with anyone else's That happened to be on-line and running napster. The quality was digital. The major problem the industry saw in this was that people were getting music for free. What they didn't realize was that people were getting to know a larger diversity then normally they would take a chance to buy. The advent of broader bandwith for many people helped spread the diversity of music throughout the US. A major drawback with music for free was that it often was truncated. When people recorded their albums to digital, they inadvertantly skipped some sections and did not self edit the final product. Often it had the wrong label on it. You would think that you were downloading one thing and when you listened to it was something different. It also took up a huge amount of computer hard drive space that had to be edited to be of any value. Computer hard drive space was at a premium. A 20 gig hard drive was considered huge.
When the Ipod came out, my big question to the friendly promoters at MacWorld was can I choose which songs would go on the thing. At first the assumption was that most people would not have more than 1 gig of songs so why worry. I did and I didn't want all of them on. Quickly in the 1.5 version of the software.. or so they allowed for you to manually choose which songs would be added to the IPod's memory. I bought one of the first Ipods and really enjoyed it. Itunes was launched at the same time. 99 cent songs at the time was very special. In later years ITunes really took off with its PC compatiability, and the pepsi bottle promotion that gave the winners a free download. One out of every 10 was a winner. My crowd scoped out the cases that seemed to have 1 out of every 2 was a winner and many times every one of the bottles was a winner. An economy sprang out of these.. the codes became an Ebay commodity.

I told myself that I would not buy a new Ipod until they came out with a video one.. sure enough the video IPod changed the landscape. At first just dismissed as a venue for music videos.. it now sports movies and TV shows. It sure makes long waits in a doctor's office more palatable. Even though there is now a 160 gb one out there my 80 gig is for right now just fine.
Pat