iPod - Music Liberator

The backlash has begun against the uber-cool product of the past few years: Apple's iPod. Over at the Times Online, one fusty critic bemoans the listening public's ability to select their own playlists and song orders. The "fad gadget," he writes, tunes out your brain, and makes every iPod the sound of familiarity and your local middle of the road radio station. Great albums are conceived as a whole (listing two albums), yet the iPod let it's user choose which songs to play, and when. On a 40G iPod you can store 10,000 songs, which means days of uninterrupted sound and unheard of variety. His battle cry?

You need a start, a middle and a finish — and one chosen by the composer.

Instead, the iPod is about liberty, freeing the listener to make this choice - play the entire Ring of the Nibelung in one go, or just an overture. CD compilations and excerpts have existed for decades, yet the choice never was in the listener's hands. Now that choice exists. And people are making that choice. The Palm Beach Daily News writes that many iPods contain guilty pleasures. We all have our strange lapses from our familiar tastes, and what's wrong with that? Apple has blazed the path to a future of choice, the other companies are leaping through the breach.