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Life's random musical shuffle |
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Monday, 07 March 2005 |
Life's
random musical shuffle
Globe and Mail -
Canada
'Life is random", reads the ad for the newly released iPod Shuffle, the
stripped-down offspring of the now ubiquitous iPod personal music player.
Developers of the iPod Shuffle were supposedly inspired by the popularity of the
shuffle option on the original iPod -- an option that will play the thousands of
songs stored on the device in a completely random order.
The iPod Shuffle takes the randomness up a notch, its central feature being the
automatic extraction of 180 songs chosen randomly from the digital music
collection on your computer. Once loaded onto the tiny music player, these songs
now make up your soundtrack for the next day or week until you go back for your
next random injection.
I'll leave the analysis of the psychological factors that lead to this
widespread fondness for random play up to the sociologically inclined. Surely
they could speculate about how it represents people's rejection of
choice-making, or is maybe a manifestation of their true belief in fate. If, as
the iPod Shuffle's marketing claims, "daily gridlock feels less mundane when you
don't know what song will play next," then I guess you could call this new world
disorder some sort of shock therapy for all of us who are slaves to routine.
That's not my main concern, however, with this large-scale shuffle, which has a
whole generation of music-listeners going about their lives accompanied by their
own arbitrary play list -- a sort of personalized radio station broadcasting
from their pockets. What's bothering me most about this so-called "random
revolution" is the future of its unintended victim, the album.
Seems to me that one thing the shuffle movement does prove is the average music
fan's preference for the song over its traditional home. The shuffle option is
essentially killing the album, which has long been the music-industry standard
for popular music releases. Songs that were played in a very particular order
over the past 50 years on vinyl, cassette and CD, have now been ripped from
their loving families and thrown into the chaos of the iPods's shuffle. In
shuffle mode, there's no more carefully crafted dynamic generated by 12 songs
flowing seamlessly from start to finish in a pre-determined order; no more
satisfaction of knowing what song comes next and singing along right from the
downbeat -- no more album!
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Last Updated ( Monday, 07 March 2005 )
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