Tonight I’m thrilled switching seamlessly between Daft Punk, The Killers, the Stone Roses’ ‘I Wanna Be Adored”, and the ever-classic sound of New Order. Who can resist the song ‘Your Silent Face’? While I can’t completely ‘date’ myself in my musical selections for the evening, I can in the way I’m tuning in…a 2009 iPod Nano. 

Remember the days when music players were all the rage? It went from the most-expensive premium iPod video/ classic, and then with time, devolved into the over-simplified and well-priced iPod shuffle. I’ve never felt the need to have to remember this conceptorary nostalgic notion of music player, since I’m self-dubbed the ‘girl with the iPod.’ Whenever I’ve met someone, gotten into severe small talk with anyone else, or kept gabbering with new friends it came up in conversation that I have this archaic fifthteen year-old piece of technology holding all my actual mp3 files, in the same way my parent’s generation used a Walkman. I ‘shazam’ with the phone app to find some of my newer tunes, I find others through other means, I write them all down on a series of messy post-its and every so often go through the process of syncing them onto my device. It seems complicated, and maybe it is, but being a true music fan it feels like the only real way to do it. 

Although it gets over complimented at times, and other times ridiculed for being a thing of the past, it re-appears in later conversation. A co-worker friend of mine never thought much of it, and then suddenly one day his online library through a big-brand media-provider re-organized their system and his library went with it. He felt hopeless and missed the days when he was fully in control of how he listened to his music, like I do everyday. 

Even though this is a piece of discontinued technology that ceased officially in 2022, it was on shelves for over twenty years, and has made Apple history for being the longest living, yet dying piece they have developed to date. It was reported that the ‘spirit of the iPod’ will live on in their endless products, but I would appreciate also looking at this from an economic standpoint, aside from the sentimentality. Looking at annual revenue from the Apple Music streaming platform, it pun-fully seems to sync with the iPod trajectory. Going back to 2016 – Apple Music revenue was approximately 1.7 Billion, according to Business of Apps, while it steadily climbed to 4.4 Billion in 2019, and a whooping 8.3 Billion in 2022, the year the iPod was discontinued. Another metric to consider is the lack of repairs and replacement of a device like the iPod warranted, since we’re talking about a machine with no internet connection or more complex parts and pieces, and only performed a few functions. This comes on the eve of dozens of articles like Nick Statt’s The Verge article `Why Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair.’ It pinpoints how companies like Apple for years have made their products purposefully more complex to generally avoid more easy or even at-home repairs.This assertion is not a charming tune for those with environmental consciousness, looking to not throw their whole iTunes music library on a phone needing to get replaced all the time at a steep expense. It raises a bunch of flags for the consumer caught between the inconvenience of device replacement and the associated costs, and the knowing of a growing waste collective, also threatening the livelihood in developing countries. According to the 2021 Grist article, the French government made strides and required technological companies rate their products with a ‘repair score’ in the name of sustainability. The iPhone 7 and beyond is rated 5.5 on a scale of 10. 

Aside from the physical device, there’s the internet. As previously stated, the classic iPod models never connected to the internet, so it was all with the understanding that songs, albums, videos were all downloaded and ‘synced’ onto the machine that was simply a player of your library at-hand. However, with the loss of these said players, people are thrusted into the new ways of streaming, which represents another monthly cost and environmental impact. With reporting by the Brightly.eco blog, New Statesman found more than five hours of listening to a digital album was more harmful than a plastic CD or vinyl. According to the same blog-post, when Olvia Rodrigo’s ‘Driver’s License’ hit was released “New Statesman estimates her viral hit has had so many Spotify streams since January 2021 that it produced a greater impact than flying from London to New York and back 4,000 times.” Without a media player limiting a user to a fixed once-downloaded playlist, music and their respective videos are being played in perpetuity through exhausting server farms, relying on environmental resources like water for cooling, something that parts of the United States are already troubled with supplying. 

On the flip side, looking at the strictly financial output – according to Fabio Duarte at Explodingtopics.com, music streaming now makes approximately 84% of industry revenue, with 78% being the listening method of choice, and grew time and time again in revenue between 2010 and 2020 from 0.40 Billion to 13.6 Billion respectively, being 34-times what it was once nearly a decade and a half ago. Now closer in 2022 the annual streaming revenue was 17.5 Billion, with a staggering comparison to 2008’s 0.30 Billion, the year iPod sales peaked over its lifetime, during the first-quarter of the year according to Statista. 

While all this data cannot be solidly pinpointed by the death and end-of-life discontinuance of the Apple iPod, it doesn’t seem to help the cause. The numbers of streaming hits, revenue streams, sustainability scores, and repairability are eerily paralleled time-line wise to the at last 2022 iPod death, since its inception in 2001. Through an ever famous ad-campaign, according to Brandvertising.com, the colorful silhouette imagery, dancing dynamism, and pop-culture references made it into our heads and carried on with the device in many of our pockets. Steve Jobs famously said “We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.”

…So maybe it’s time we all re-consider this, to have 1,000 songs in our pocket, and spare a few servers and a few billion dollars of revenue the individual will never see but only spend.