End is nigh for the iPod, but us dinosaurs keep spinning discs

When the iPod first hit the shelves, it was hard to fathom how you could download up to a thousand of your favourite tunes onto a device that sat in the palm of your hand – until they then came up with an app that meant you didn’t have to download them at all, thus signalling the beginning of the end for an invention which breathed its last a week ago.

The advent of digital streaming services meant your music didn’t take up any space at all; not alone that, but by playing one song, this wondrous invention guessed what you’d like to hear next – until it seemed to know more about you than you knew yourself.

Which is a problem – because none of us likes to be read like an open book.

And the other problem this streaming service that it seems to think musicians can live on fresh air and 30 cent a year in exchange for the perpetual rights to their entire back catalogue.

So, not wanting to become slaves to Big Brother, some music fans took a step back into the past and returned to CDs – or more probably even further back, to the glorious world of vinyl.

It’s a considerably dearer option of course, but there’s still nothing about Spotify that brings that warm feeling to match the moment when the needle drops onto a twelve-inch circle of black and you get six songs as the artist intended you to hear them, without an artificial intelligence aggregator in sight.

Last week Apple announced that it was discontinuing production of the iPod Touch, bringing to an end a device widely praised for revolutionising how people listen to music.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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