How do you get songs on an iPod?

We’ve commodified most of the media we consume and now everyone is telling me that having ‘taste’ is everything. Well, well, well, look how commodified the anti-commodification message has become.

Anyway, my partner handed me an iPod Classic and asked me, “Can you make me a playlist?” After connecting it with a new 30-pin cable we had to buy, almost half of the 29k+ songs in my library can’t be synced due to DRM. Fine, it’s over 20 years old, but it really shouldn’t be that complicated: here’s a song, here’s the storage, now kiss.

The streaming platforms sold me the idea that i could have any song, any time, anywhere. Yet i don’t recall what i added to my library last week. My habits got simpler, and i stopped paying attention to the things i used to.

I got into electronic music in my mid-to-late teens. Drum’n’bass, breakbeat, UK garage and 2-step. On weekends i’d scour Bleep, Boomkat, Juno, and a few blogs for new releases, listen to the previews and get the stuff that i liked. I spent a lot of my time matching tags and artwork from Discogs. It was almost like a religious practice. In my twenties i started reading reviews and branched out to other genres, but kept the ritual going. And one day i just stopped.

At first it was iTunes Match (still works btw). Then Apple Music. Yeah, it was annoying to have songs disappear, stop playing or get their artwork replaced, but it was mostly fine.

The intentional act of curation was gone. But i had gained ‘taste’.

Sharing is not always caring

I think that sharing something, like a song, that matters to us diminishes the meaning. Putting it in front of others feeds our own idea that ‘this is cool’ and feeds the audience’s appetite, but not their curiosity. We just give them the answer, without the question or the interest to seek out answers of their own. To get ‘taste’ you have to put in the work or copy Steve Jobs’s life arc from studying calligraphy to smoking weed in India.

Maybe start gatekeeping again? Or at least consider what to share. Share the itch, not the scratch. And i think this applies broadly, not only to music.

Kelefa Sanneh said that: “Communities are important, and they rely on inclusion and exclusion”. i-D wrote a whole defence of it. And if you want to get into Berghain, you’ll be gatekept by Sven, in person.

What’s on the iPod?

Not all of the cool stuff at once, of course. The other day my partner came home mumbling a song from the iPod that i recognised. We went back and forth on what the lyrics were (i always thought it was “Sometimes I share…”), and i got curious enough to look it up. They really were: “Sometimes I shave my legs and sometimes I don’t.”