Apple (Records?) / Steve Job's greatest hit - the iPod

Music technology
Steve Jobs made music more fun
The Economist, Aug 25th 2011, 14:00 by T.D.L. | LONDON
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/08/music-technology

Steve Jobs, who has resigned as the boss of Apple, is departing the
stage rather the way he used to at those over-controlled press
conferences—in a hail of media acclaim. And rightly so, because he is
a huge figure in technology and business. But one of his achievements
is in danger of being overlooked. It’s in the field of music. Sure, he
shook the foundations of the music industry, but that’s just an
industry. The music is the thing, and Mr Jobs, along with his chief
designer, Jonathan Ive, has made music more fun.

The iPod isn’t just an elegant design and a miracle of compression.
Putting it in shuffle mode is the most satisfying way yet devised of
enjoying your record collection. It allows the present and the past to
intertwine, which is how music works anyway. If you’re a rock and pop
fan, it gives you a stream of songs that is eclectic, unpredictable
and serendipitous.

It throws up endless interesting juxtapositions: just now my iPod came
up with Nick Cave, Judy Collins, Kasabian, Elvis Costello, Booker T,
the Beatles, PJ Harvey, Arcade Fire and the Carpenters. It’s not
perfect (why is it so determined to team Nick Lowe with Led
Zeppelin?), but if you don’t like one of its choices you can just
press fast-forward. Thanks to shuffle, you can create a radio station
of a kind that died out when the broadcasters allowed niche
playlisting to become a tyranny. And it doesn’t have any chit-chat or
jingles or adverts. The music really is the thing.

Some people, as they look round a crowded carriage at all the
commuters lost in white headphones, see isolation, self-absorption,
atomisation. What they don’t see is a lot of people enjoying an art
form, and turning the dullest stretch of their day into a treat. The
iPad is beguiling, but it's essentially a slimmer, sexier laptop; the
iPhone is just first among smartphones. Mr Jobs's greatest hit, the
Apple gadget that has done most to enrich the fabric of daily life, is
still the iPod.