It was sometime in the spring of 1998 when I first concieved of the iPod. A friend had just purchased a mini disc player and we were looking at it, talking about the evolution on music formats -- 12 inch vinyl, three inch CD, two inch mini-disc. We decided that what would be really great is if all your music could fit on a single device, something about the size of a deck of cards.

We had to wait a few years, but the iPod and it's immitators have more the fulfilled our basic request. We should I susppose by very happy about this development. It was what we wanted after all.

But somewhere along the way, I lost touch with music and I blame, not the iPod extactly, but the move from tangible to ephemral which brought with certain unconscious changes that we had not anticipated.

I'm not a luddite. I like technology and while everything that follows are problems, real problems I believe, I'm not giving up my iPod, nor am I pining for the return of some archaic format like Vynal or CDs.  with services like Spotfiy or Pandora putting infinite amounts of music