R.I.P iTunes, you will never be forgotten

In the distant past, before Spotify was even a notion – those days where, instead of most tunes (barring of course those elusive prog-rock albums which evade Spotify’s grasp: looking at you, Porcupine Tree. I want ‘Fear of a Blank Planet’ available to stream, damn it!) being instantly available at the whim of a ‘like’ and an ‘add to playlist’, listening to music was a bit more of a process. In fact, it was solid graft: there was the purchase of the digital album, or, of course, you could always rip your CD to your laptop, and then, ‘sync to iPod’. Two steps, two WHOLE steps, what a chore! Honestly, you felt really proud when your favourite tracks would appear with that little green tick letting you know that the upload was successful, magical.

It was exciting: you see, when you were in Year 7, and you had compulsory reading classes at lunchtime every day because your year group was either behind on reading (likely) and not to be trusted out in the wild (fair enough), your rebellious nature took over and decided that that half-hour would be better spent listening to your iPod. You’d take those white headphones and snake them down your sleeve to reveal the bud, music was literally in the palm of your hand; you’d press your head against your hands, in apparent bored concentration, while your eyes scanned the pages of the book you pretended to read and Green Day’s ‘21st Century Breakdown’ streamed into your right ear.

You and your friend both had iPod classics – they each had 80GB; 20,000 songs and more, you were told – and would listen to albums again and again. Your friend would get annoyed because you’d shuffle the album (“that’s not how you should listen to this!” he’d hiss over the barely-maintained silence, because you were on track 7 and he was still on track 2) but regardless, you’d exit the enforced book club none-the-wiser about ‘Little Women’, but were content with having memorised all of Mike Dirnt’s basslines.

Spotify is great, don’t get me wrong. Not a day goes by where I don’t use it; and it’s always recommending me new artists: artists I genuinely would have never discovered if it wasn’t for that clever little algorithm. And, it still fills me with childish delight that I can use my phone as a remote-controller for when I’m streaming music on my laptop. But, in the age of digital media, there was really something about iTunes, because it truly encompassed the best of both worlds.

You could, of course, stream music on your laptop – like Spotify – but you also had the utter technical art of ripping a CD – sadly, it seems nowadays that CDs have been rehomed, and now live in the car, to be listened to maybe once in a blue moon when no one can be bothered to make a playlist for the aux cord. You’d buy a CD with the £10 allowance you got, but only if your mate bought one as well, so you could trade as soon as you uploaded to each respective library. Your mate looked at you with dismay once because you bought him ‘Nevermind’ for his birthday (the internet said it was a classic) but, having removed the plastic covering to firstly upload it to your iTunes so you could brag that Nirvana were one of your favourite bands, what you had done was quite obvious. “Have you already opened this?” he asked, and you tried to convince him that he was mistaken. “That’s just how it came”, you meekly explained.

With vinyl making a comeback, the art of physically collecting music is becoming more popular once again. Alas, not everyone has a record player. In my honest opinion, iPods and the like were somewhat more accessible. And while my iPod classic sits on my shelf, sadly collecting dust, I know that if I were to ever take a trek into the wilderness, it would have my back, reliably playing hours upon hours of music – I mean, the battery on that thing is insane. I would just have to remember to sync my now (slightly more) sophisticated playlist onto it; lest I would be stuck listening to ‘Whatcha Say’ for the entirety of my hypothetical trip.

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