Molding our Space, our Time

"But at the same time, [Steve Jobs] quietly built what the [music] labels most feared right into the iPod itself. Think about it: Who can afford to stock even say, a 40GB device-- somewhere in the realm of 7,000 songs-- by legally shelling out 99 cents each? A large part of Jobs' legacy was training us to think of music in terms of bulk storage and access, instead of merely cost."

I would also posit that Jobs trained us to think about music more temporally than before. Sure, CD's are famously made to hold the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a single disc, and thus in a way restrict the artist to an hour-ish time frame, but at the iTunes store your time:money ratio stares you in the face. A seven or eight minute song costs often the same 99 cents as a two or one minute song, so the basic quantity of music paid for actually starts invading what was once more a quality-driven purchase. Music used to have a cost, but the breakdown was rarely so stark.

Once the song is stored on the iPod and played, two timers run simultaneously: how much time has passed since the beginning of this song and how much time remains until the next song. This constant, and I would argue obsessive tracking creates an entirely different listening experience than, say, vinyl, in which no timers are visible other than the abstract gliding needle. Not all CD players have timers displayed, either. Combine the displayed cost ratio, the visible countdown to a new song and the bulk storage the iPod offers and you get a listenership easily swayed to impatience and song-skipping. How many times have I been in a car with someone who can't stop switching songs? I knew a guy who would skip the outro's of songs because he could see that the song was winding down and deemed the last few seconds unimportant. This is largely a product of the bulk storage / easy access the iPod provides -- incessant song-skipping wouldn't be a problem with a stack of CD's or vinyl -- but storage space and time are intimately tied in the iPod's design. 

iTunes displays the quantity of your music measured in days and gigabytes side by side, which is a weird mixture of space filled and time spent for an art that is by nature aural and ephemeral, without space and, at its best, evocative of a feeling without time. This definition of space and time gets in the way of deep, immersed enjoyment of a single album, and surely repeated listening is hampered as well. When you can download ten albums in as many minutes and throw them on your iPod all at once, quantity again overwhelms the listener.