While living and working in Edinburgh in 2008 I set out to write one million words in 366 days... but only managed 800,737.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Great (?) Moments in iPod Shuffle #5

Isle of Q – Bag of Tricks
Isle of Q – Little Scene

I only have two songs by Isle of Q on my iPod. Out of a possible 6,300 songs, these 2 appeared back to back.

The thing about iPods is they accelerate the pace at which you become like your parents. That is: your taste is frozen in a particular era. Isle of Q’s two singles came out in 2000, and most people will have heard one or the other, but few would ever think of the band when asked, ‘Name a band beginning with I’.

(When I just asked myself to name a band beginning with ‘I’, my answer was Icehouse… who also have 2 songs on my iPod, though ‘Great Southern Land’ and ‘Electric Blue’ leave Isle of Q for dead. I think this also supports my tastes frozen in the past theory).

iPods are distorting the Darwinian nature of the music industry. A song like ‘Bag of Tricks’ should be forgotten by now. If not forgotten, at least not listened to 11 times in the last 3 years (it must be a favourite of my iPod as this is how many times it has been thrown up on shuffle).

The fact is, shuffle isn’t perfect. It has its favourites. If only you could give your iPod to someone with better taste than you and get them to weight the chance a song will be played on shuffle based on how often you need to hear this song. Then again, who has better taste in music than me?

Don’t answer that.

Which reminds me, I really should buy my tickets to Monster Magnet in Estonia in November. I want tickets to the show in Riga too, but I can’t buy them online the now (that’s not a typo, just my idiomatic Scottish coming through).

No comments: