Why I Use An iPod in 2024

To this day, few things bring me to a more relaxed state than spending time sitting and listening to music, and making that music my singular point of focus for however much time I have. When I was a kid, it was with the cassettes I made by recording my favorite songs off the radio. As I got older, I got into the CDs my parents had, like Michael Jackson's 'Thriller.' I would throw my headphones on and immerse myself in a different world for the length of the album.
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The advent of file-sharing services like Limewire and Kazaa meant that an 11-year-old kid with no money had access to more music than ever before. My brother and I became MP3 hoarders and discovered a ton of music during this time. I would burn bootleg copies of my favorite albums onto CDs and would even print out the album art to put in jewel cases to pretend like I had the real thing. Eventually, my parents bought me an MP3 player that could fit hundreds of CDs onto it. I started accumulating more music than I could even listen to, but I was in heaven.

Fast forward to today. With streaming services, we have access to what seems like all the music in the world in our pocket. This is great, right?
I started noticing that I personally was spending less and less time in that immersed world enjoying my favorite music and more time skipping from song to song. I would rarely get through a full album, and anytime I tried, I would find myself browsing social media 2 or 3 songs in. This became concerning to me as someone who spent so much time listening to music. Do I not enjoy it anymore? Is music just not good these days?

In 2023, I started buying and listening to vinyl (which you can read about here: why-i-listen-to-vinyl-in-2024.html) and I found something clicked. The intentionality with which I would put a record on reminded me of what it means to sit and singularly listen to an album. You can appreciate the work as a whole, hear how the songs flow into each other. With an album, a song that you would normally skip over when streaming becomes an important part of the album as a whole. I found myself enjoying music again.
I wanted to bring this feeling into the digital world. I decided to dig my old iPod classic out from the drawer it was collecting dust in and found a community online of people who repair and upgrade iPods. After breaking my own iPod as I learned how to work on it, I bought another one on eBay that had a bad battery and dead hard drive and upgraded it myself with an SD card, new battery, new faceplate, and new backplate (anyone who has owned a classic iPod knows how scratched up those backplates get just from breathing on them).
Since then, I've loaded all of my CDs onto my iPod and I'm back to enjoy all of my music. The main draw with listening on an iPod vs. a phone is that there are no distractions. When I'm listening to music, I'm listening. I'm hearing the crispness of the cymbals, the growl of the bass, and the crunch of the guitar.

I continue to make an effort to focus more singularly on different parts of my life. These including my work, my relationships, and my hobbies. I hope this post encourages you to think about where you might need a more singular focus in your life.