Doing the $300 shuffle

The iPod is no longer just a growing fad. Every other person I see on campus has one, all my friends have them and, worst of all, even some of my professors have them.

The numbers don't lie either; more than $10 million Americans are equipped with Apple's biggest success since the iMac.

Yet, just like I did with cell phones, I put my foot down and swore that I will never own an iPod unless technology and the music industry leave me with no other option.

And, like cell phones, I have my reasons for why I will never own one of those "amazing" little devices that could probably store more music in its metal and plastic innards than most people can store in an armful of full CD wallets. Plain and simple, I am a music lover and almost as much as I respect the music I respect the art of constructing an album of music.

The Beatles' White Album isn't a masterpiece because of musical works of art like "While my Guitar Gently Weeps" or "Mother Nature's Son," it's a masterpiece because of the 18 other songs that were carefully constructed, mastered and seamlessly placed around them that makes the album so good.

Hey, Pink Floyd didn't make the perfect soundtrack for the Wizard of Oz in Dark Side of the Moon so that one song from that album could come up on shuffle on some kids expanded-storage iPod while walking to class.

So right now you're probably saying, "OK, so what, don't buy one then." Well we already covered that and it's true, my feeble ranting and raving about this latest techno-trend isn't going to change a thing.

But what if the music that we all love so much takes a hit when iPods, other MP3 players and the suppliers of the music (like iTunes and competitors such as RealNetworks) change music from album format to a one-song format? Won't the music, and the musicians who make it, suffer as a result?

I guess I've never really been a "best of" kind of music fan. I've always preferred those hidden B-side tracks 40 minutes into a CD or record; those songs that aren't catchy enough to be singles but serve to give an album the kind of cohesiveness or playability that will keep it in heavy rotation months after purchase.

I mean what's the point of buying the whole Franz Ferdinand album or latest Modest Mouse album when you can just download the stupidly-catchy singles that surely have outsold the rest of the songs on either artists albums? Well, the answer is that those records are both great collections of music, perfectly constructed and, as a whole, earn their credibility because of all the songs, not just the one "hit."

I actually hate uber-catchy songs so adamantly that I went through the trouble to recopy my version of Modest Mouse's latest record minus its hit "Float On;" and yes, it is better without it.

So remember, next time you're listening to your $300 iPod on shuffle from one hit song to the next, somewhere out there is a whole record of music that was meant to go along with it, and the musician who made it is suffering because you purchased only one of his or her songs from some music dealer for 99 cents.