Gadget Reviews

The best of course.

Ipods are simply the best=]
I have a custom made pink Ipod touch.
I absolutely adore it.
You should get one.

ipods are the best thing that could have happened to the music industry.

possibly one of the things thats killing the music industry. but the music phones are more so. i thought a simple use of a phone was to talk on it and text not to bust out tunes?

that depends on if you work for Mac or not!

Great question. I hadn’t considered it until you made me put my cereal down.

The problem with digitally purchased music is the best albums tell stories and aren’t merely compilations of songs. Each song is related to the mood of the writer and the album flows. Check out the Foo Fighters’ latest to get a gist of what I mean.

Anyway, buying only one song at a time is detrimental to the experience of the album. However, the last twenty years have really been crappy in terms of great albums. By great I mean essentially what I wrote earlier, in that the whole album is good, maybe not the first or second time, but years down the road when one finds it in his 200 cd book and sticks it in and really jams to it. Those are the best “records.”

What this means is after the two singles are released, the rest of the album is just filler, and it’s not even whole milk filler; more like the horrible 1% skim milk that looks like cloudy water. The product (in general) has been so bad lately that I’m hesitant to buy a cd new and will generally wait to see if I can get it used.

The music industry has done it to themselves. They’ve been producing so many crappy products for so long that people are digging out their old music just to fill the drive time. With Metallica so worried and crying about the sharing of music (and it is illegal), new bands are hard to find and many play the same riffs, just in different order, anyway.

To answer your question, I say iPods are neither. The music ***** not because of the iPod, but because of the consumers’ overwhelming ability to settle for the crap the industry is making. Good music is good, and the bad eventually disappears into oblivion and takes the intellect of it’s fans with it.

The iPod and mp3 players, if anything, have made people learn what song goes with which artist and makes the discussion of music (however bleak) enlivening. And that’s what music is about: bringing people together. As Hendrix said, “Young, energized people will either go to a concert or a riot.” I choose the former.