The first record I ever bought was a TV offer double album of the Monkees greatest hits. My sisters and I watched the show every day after school, and I had cleared just enough with my first communion money to order it. I loved it, even after leaving one record on the turntable during the wrong part of the afternoon and warping it in the sun.
I bought my first cassette in high school. I don't remember what it was, but I'm sure I bought it after I had started driving. There must have been a point when the practicality of it made sense: Why buy the record when all I was going to do was put it on a blank tape to listen to in the car?
I bought my first compact disc during my freshman year of college. My roommate Steve had a CD player, and I lived with him for two years. We mostly liked the same music so it made sense, especially since I knew CDs were the next step of music technology, and I would eventually have my own CD player.
Compact discs probably had a longer staying power in my timeline than records and tapes. It would have been somewhere in the early 2000s when I took the plunge into digital music, iPods, and the iTunes store. I’ve never taken any illegal drugs and I’ve never been drunk, which is good because I’m convinced the iTunes store revealed that I have an addictive personality. I wouldn't try to estimate how much money I've spent on downloads since it wouldn’t do anything but depress me. I had to continually update my iPod every few years because my music library kept outgrowing my iPod storage capacity.
Then iPods changed. They became more about apps than songs. I couldn’t understand this, because why would you want to use up precious storage space with apps that you ultimately wouldn’t use as much? It didn’t matter though, because I had my standard iPod, one with far more storage capacity than the first five computers I owned combined. I was covered.
Then Apple stopped making iPods, and repairing them was no longer an option. To quote Neil Peart, I felt a shadow cross my heart. I ran to Best Buy that day and bought a brand new iPod Nano, much smaller than the one I had but at least a decent backup for emergencies. I took care of my main iPod like a Faberge egg, really only moving it between my bedroom and living room, so it was doing well.
Then Apple killed the iTunes store. The Apple Music streaming service became their music flagship and there wasn’t much reason to keep it around. This is the reason I won’t update the operating system on my laptop, since the system I have now is the last one that allows access to the leftover ghost of what the iTunes store has become. I want to hang on to that as long as I possibly can.
That old main Classic iPod has been showing its age lately. Even though it sits in charging ports almost constantly, I can see the battery indicator quickly fall off if I leave it sitting unplugged for more than a few minutes. Sometimes it will randomly stop playing, or suddenly power down and restart itself for no reason. I have to believe it’s on its last legs, and sometime soon the day will come when it powers off for no reason and simply won’t boot up again.
My music files are backed up on a laptop and on two separate external drives. I have two iPod Nanos that could get me by. The problem is my home speaker and my alarm clock, which both have ports for much older iPods. Once the big one goes, I’ll be facing a forced systematic upgrade. New bluetooth technology, finally deciding on a streaming service, all the other things that come with that paradigm shift I’ve resisted for so long, since I still love what I have now. I’m feeling like that weird uncle or older cousin everyone in my generation had who refused to give up his 8-track tapes.
I almost feel like I should start to switch over pre-emptively, so when the iPod finally ends its long term of service, I won’t be left without access to the music I need so badly.
The problem is, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
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