A requiem for an iPod

I find my usually sunny disposition towards the Apple Corporation darker than the horizons of that poor Malawian child Madonna recently adopted. My iPod broke. Seriously — the poor thing had been limping through life like a three-legged dog for the three months since its warranty ended. I resorted to such tried-and-true resuscitation methods as dropping my iPod on the floor and dropkicking her. But my lovingly administered folk remedies only staved off her inevitable passing for a short while. And now I mourn the loss of my beloved shiny white music player, my refuge from human contact, my excuse for not saying hi as I pass you on my way to class.

But in my grief I found clarity. Now that iPod had passed, I was forced to reflect on what I really loved about her, what she meant to me in life. iPod brought me, indeed she brought us all, increased capacity for music. I found space on my iPod and in my heart for more music than ever before. iPod had saved me from my old ways of musical particularism and opened my eyes so that I might embrace more catholic taste.

But as my palette widened my hunger for new music grew. I acquired music of myriad styles and from myriad places. With the help of my trusty iPod, my external hard drive, and the glorious wonderland that is the Internet, my reach always matched my grasp. Only in retrospect did I realize that, in return for musical salvation, I had made a sacrifice, sealing the eternal covenant of iPod if you will. In return for all her bounty, iPod had demanded of me a certain moral dexterity that even I, a child of the digital generation, would never have anticipated.

Not long after I bought my first CD, I purchased my first CD burner. My first spindle of blanks came not long after that. The first coming of Napster followed soon thereafter. And yet even the Avi of the Napster era would have been shocked by what iPod had made of me. I committed all four cardinal sins of Record Industry Association of America. I downloaded; I ripped library CDs; I copied from friends; I gave music to other people.

Wiping the tears from my eyes, I wondered, "Have I been this bad all along, or am I just a product of my iPod?" Always an eccentric, denial came to me second. "Screw that!" I thought, "I'm not bad. I didn't do anything wrong. I wouldn't have bought the music anyway. And if I had, the record companies would have screwed the artists anyway."

But now I see the error of my ways, the fallacy of my poorly constructed syllogism. In a fantasy world where I had no iPod, no computer, no Internet and no desire for music, I wouldn't have bought that music I "acquired." But I do want the music. Or at least, I want the good bits of it. And I do owe something to the people who make those good bits. The fact that music is infinitely copyable does not mean I place no value on it. People worked hard to create that value. The fact that I cannot be forced to pay for it does not mean that I should not.

Can I reconcile my hypocrisy? What do I do to get more moral fiber into my diet? My hypocrisy is a vast thing, so I probably can't nullify it all. But even in this specific instance it's going to be hard. Record companies really do screw artists. And they screw them even more on online sales through iTunes than they do with CDs. Don't believe me? Check out the numbers (1). Nine cents a song hardly seems fair, especially if you don't think that Apple and the record label add most of the production value to the music you like. Dear god, I hope you don't listen to music like that.

For now I've settled on what I think is a happy medium. I don't download music. Instead, I borrow it temporarily. The semantics make all the difference. I listen on Pandora.com. I take CDs out of the library and I borrow them from friends. I'd use Ruckus if I owned a machine that could run Windows. If I like something I'm listening to I'll go to a show or buy the CD. If I don't like what I'm listening to, I delete it. I'm running out of disk space anyway.

NOTE: This article is in no way an admission of guilt. It is a philosophical discourse in the form of a first-person narrative for the sake of concreteness. Yes, it is.

(1) I'm gonna put an ad hominem attack in a footnote because I'm a cool hipster like those folks at the Nass. Oh, and the numbers are at www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/. Avi Flamholz'07 is a computer science major from Teaneck, N.J. He may be reached at flamholz@princeton.edu.