Back in the days when I was a junior at highschool, I used to own an iPod touch. It was the first personal device that I had in the sense that we have today. That device was my personal computer and I did everything in my power to push its limits.
One thing that was rally bold for me in that computer was the Music app itself. I had roughly a hundred and fifty songs. My music collection was so small that I had the order of songs in my head and could scroll the flow to find the one that I wanted.
[Image of an iPod with Coverflow]
I loved those days. Having all of my songs, in my pocket, in that gorgeous covering made the whole thing such an intimate feeling that made me enjoy my songs more and more.
Yet the dazzling fact about technology is its impatience towards staying still. This has become of such an establishment, it’s incredibly hard to even notice it anymore. In the case of my music collection, this once very intimate connection with music, also made it easier overtime to collect it. At first, I used to get the songs from the internet, and I had the habit of refining their metadata, finding a gorgeous cover so that my overflow looked awesome and it was so hard to download even one song that I had care towards what I would collect.
As time went by, this experience changed. Internet took so many upgrades and every now and then it got easier to obtain music. Then the grand inauguration of Jony Ive happened. Form followed function in every pixel of the iOS 7 and it suddenly officiated the movement towards modern design in interfaces that was going on for one or two years at that time.
One huge effect of that transition was the stab in the back to Coverflow. It’s been so long that I actually had to add the word “Coverflow” back to Mac’s dictionary.
Somewhere else, very close to this change was another idea making its way to the public and it was the music streaming services. Spotify, Pandora, and others redefined what it was to have music. You could own buy albums you liked for something like 15-30$ each or you could rent about the whole world’s music by only 10$ a month. Some deals are good, this one was insane.
And so even the iTunes and the “Music” app in the iOS changed to a Spotify clone and therefore it was I who was exposed to a catalogue of around 75 million songs. Can you just even imagine it? It a decade’s worth of time, our access to music so dramatically changed that it’s just insane to compute. I have around eight thousand artists in my collection now and they collectively have twenty thousand songs that is saved on my library.
What used to be a simple collection is now so huge that I have to use apps specifically designed to dig into my collection and let me rediscover it.
You should have defiantly reached a point in this text that you have at least once asked yourself what’s the point of this?. Well, the things really simple. Today the music I accumulate is so easily obtained that I have less and less appreciation for it.
That is also true about almost anything else. I have thousands of app purchased on my Apple account, I have seen hundreds or maybe thousands of movies and series, and I have had so many many books that I no longer call if I even read them or recall their content.
My appreciation for content is getting lost a little bit more by everyday that comes by. That is even true about real life material. I no longer care about the material purchases.