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Much has been said about 'the iPod effect' already, from the sub-atomisation of preferences (even opinions) to mark the whimpering end of the Mass Market, to how every handheld gizmo is slowly turning into something to satisfy musical sensibilities (or at least pretending to). True, and true again. There's evidence. Music playlists are getting highly individualised. Having two people's 1,000-song iPod menu match, tune to tune, would in all probability be the modern equivalent of a random keyboard-happy monkey hammering out a Shakespeare sonnet without a space lost. But is Apple's cool new device, the iPod, doing all this? Ah, now that's like asking: did Apple Macintosh overthrow the 'central command' superstructure of computing or did its overthrow give the brand its prominence? Anyhow, Apple is Apple. And its fans won't be pleased to just have it hastening any old trend. Individualisation is done. It's something that Sony's Walkman could claim as its own (even if it was conceived for social politeness more than individual gratification). There's nothing awfully Applish in that, is there? The one new thing that does happen when music goes online (or rather, gets offline), however, is the 'search' thing. For the first time, the world's musical knowledge base is getting hyperlinked, and it's a crazy maze out there in cyberspace. That's the wonder of digital technology. Search is all the more exciting because of music that's lost. Records of music ('records' as in preservation for posterity) are quite recent in the history of the world. Which is a pity. But not as much of a pity as all the current stuff that gets lost in all the din of mass music marketing. iPod's role, really, is to help pick the sense in all the nonsense, and keep you tuned to that very special frequency of your own. It's not a 'playback' device, you see, it's a navigation device. One that quickly adapts itself to your sensibility. And sound navigation is needed even if you start off as a statistic---a one-among-millions recipient of mass music. Take the Spiderman-2 soundtrack, which was marketed by a huge marketing machine across the world, and is regarded by many as the market-defining 'sound of America' today (if that's at all a possibility anymore in a market that's learning to defy definitions; after all, it's rappers like Jay-Z who say so much more saying so little). Mass is just the word for it. There's just too much sound out there, before you get to track anything. It's quite a web, to mix metaphors, with all its decoy strands, half-strings and stuff. So when a band called Switchfoot wails about being lost, the sentiment is lost on millions, but for some, especially those equipped with appropriate technology, it hyperlinks itself with the sound of another band, a band that describes itself as lost and wants to wake people up. Technology, in other words, is getting intuitive. The noisy stuff will remain noisy stuff to those who think it's noisy stuff. That's just how it should be. But the manoeuvrings within all the noise---for those into their kinda stuff---will get better and better, resulting in a market more efficient than ever before. That's the actual iPod effect. Getting the sounds to those who'd value them most. And the informational context will undergo a change too. Back in the old days, we had teens rocking to the sound of Mr Mister's 'Kyrie Eleison' without a clue what it meant. Now it's a simple search...for a change. But that still doesn't mean all that's lost can so easily be recovered. No, it ain't that simple.
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