The first time I heard an MP3 I was completely unimpressed. I had received a CD of tracks from a new, hopeful digital music web site (now long gone) at a music conference tradeshow. Hillary Johnson and I sat down and listened to some of the tracks, presumably converted from original 44.1 CDs to MP3 encoding and then back to CD. The songs sounded grainy, flat and worse than cassettes to us.
Recently I was visiting New Orleans and hanging with John Fischbach of Piety Street Studios when John told me how he had hooked up the new Apple iTunes service and was buying songs over the Internet for 99 cents each. In my mind I had relegated the world of music downloading to college kids and bored slackers, so this revelation from a man a few years my senior made me feel like I was possibly writing something off that I should be paying attention to.
I bought an Apple iBook soon after, to help me with editing Tape Op, and while preparing to go on a short business trip wondered if I could load CDs into the MP3 player and avoid carrying a bunch of albums with me. I skeptically opened up iTunes and loaded in the new Radiohead album and some Pink Floyd. Upon playback, I was surprised. The songs didn't sound totally ruined, and how convenient to have tunes loaded in my computer for travel. I burned another bunch of CDs in for the trip (Dead Can Dance, Floyd, Eno, Guided By Voices, Joy Division, King Tubby, The Beatles, etc.) and got excited about being able to listen to all of this stuff. I even bought a $19 speaker set with baby subwoofer that I could carry in my luggage (didn't sound half bad either) and threw in a pair of Ultrasone Trackmaster headphones (which I can't recommend highly enough).
Somehow this technology got me excited about listening to music again. What songs would I put in the computer? What mix of tunes would make a good shuffle selection? Then I decided to investigate the iTunes web site. I downloaded iTunes 4, as the program that came with the computer wouldn't allow access to the "music store". What I found was an easy-to-use web site that allowed 99-cent downloads of songs, with a discount for purchasing full albums. Not necessarily cheap, but simple and straight-ahead. No joining any stupid service and fairly unlimited use once you bought the music. I loaded a few tracks out of the mostly mainstream catalog and went on my trip.
Upon returning home I decided to hook the audio output of my laptop to my home stereo. At first it seemed really weird to be selecting songs off of my computer, but I started making playlists with various themes to them and putting the iTunes in shuffle. It was like a radio station without ads and bum tracks. Pretty cool. My wife even got into it, despite her initial horror at what I called "The Future of Music Listening", loading CDs in and making her own playlists. It's sometimes all wrong when you hear What's Going On or The Dark Side of the Moon out of sequence, but the changing of context can also bring previously "hidden" tracks to the fore, turning me on to music I already had but never noticed. It's especially revealing with compilation records, where you can delete the duds and dig the great songs you may have passed by — plus it's easy to see who the artist or song is on screen.