A Tale of Two MP3 Players

Back in early 2007, I began to load my new Philips MP3 player with my all-time favorite songs. Eventually, I amassed more than 200 of these, most of which I have listed as all-time favorites in earlier blog articles. And I would take this MP3 with me to work and happily listen to them!

Late last year, I bought a Sansa MP3 player with more memory space (but occupying much less physical space). I hadn't put too many songs on it until this year, when I discovered several great independent/alternative acts (like Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Iron and Wine, Metric, and Broken Social Scene). And this MP3 player is loaded with their works (although it is rather incomplete, it still has 300+ songs on it). It is this player, not the former with my all-time favorites, that I have regularly been listening to.

One day last week, I accidentally left the Sansa MP3 player at home and was left with the options of listening to my "all-time favorites" or nothing at all. Of course, I tried out the old Philips MP3 playlist, thinking that it would be fun to hear the old classics again. I didn't expect what happened.

I could only listen to my old MP3 a few minutes before I had to turn it off! Why? The songs that I had come to love through the years were grating on my ears and sounded almost strange in their dissonance. Sure, I knew all of them almost by heart from earlier repetitive listening, but my tastes had drastically changed over the past three months.

In February this year, I began to refine my exposure to the enormous variety of music available by using the Internet. Specifically, AOL Radio and LastFM.com, which sets up personalized radio stations based on preferred artists. On AOL Radio, I listened to their Indie Rock station, which introduced me to Sufjan Stevens. From there, I plugged this artist's name into the LastFM setup search engine and generated a station that introduced me to the others that I now enjoy (and greatly prefer) listening to.

So now I have two MP3's: one plays the old favorites and one plays a narrow, Web-defined genre of music that is tailored to my tastes. And I find myself now greatly preferring obscure tracks from obscure albums by obscure artists over my beloved lifetime favorites.

From 1964 to the beginning of 2009, I picked my favorite songs from the pool of music that radio programmers deemed fit to broadcast. Sure, some of those songs were deep tracks from albums, but although the radio didn't play them, they still originated from acts receiving air play. So in a way I was a sort of "musical scavenger" picking my way through material others had left to choose from. In the process, I sometimes made favorites out of songs that were just the best of the sometimes mediocre pool of songs selected for airplay.

But now, with the Internet, I can forge my own tastes and "conjure up" acts that fit them best. Radio has become almost completely irrelevant to me, at least as far as music is concerned!

The time for me to purchase a third MP3 player is approaching, for I have almost filled the second one. I wonder whether the content of the third will be as different in nature from the second (Sansa) as that one is from the first (Philips)?