It held my favourite mainstream tracks – and the obscure ones. But it couldn’t hold off the march of time, and Spotify
It’s the end of the iPod era. The news that Apple is pulling the plug on the iPod Touch, and thus the entire 21-year-old line, is curiously timed for me because I only recently retired my iPod Classic. Every month for the past 30 years, I’ve made a compilation of my favourite songs. It’s a time capsule of musical memories.
For the first decade I used cassettes to make my compilations. This required a lot of creative editing, tense retakes and hovering over the pause button like a predator. After that, the simple drag-and-drop of an iTunes playlist felt miraculous. Even once Spotify arrived, I kept this up for years as an act of commitment: love a song, buy a song, own a song. But for boring technical reasons, the computer that housed my music could no longer handle the iTunes store, so I had to download songs on one device, transport them to another and individually add them to the library, a process which was almost as laborious as making a tape. Reprogrammed by touchscreens, my fingers found the iPod’s click wheel increasingly alien. Why was I still doing this? I didn’t know. So I stopped.
Dorian Lynskey is a freelance writer, podcaster and author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute and The Ministry of Truth
