The iPod revolution offers a soundtrack to your life
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BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT and JOEL GEHRINGER / Lincoln Journal Star
In October 2001, Steve Jobs boldly predicted that “listening to music will never be the same again” after his company put a new product on the market. The company is Apple. The product was iPod. And Jobs just may have been right. In the last 5½ years, Apple has sold more than 42 million of the tiny, stylish digital music players, making the iPod one of the most successful and quickly adopted consumer electronic devices ever.
You can spot iPod owners almost anywhere by the telltale white cords coming out of their ears.
But they’re even more prevalent in college towns like Lincoln, where coffee shops are filled with iPod listeners working away on their laptops or with books scattered on the tables in front of them and where professors assume students have the devices so they can listen to lectures.
Those lectures come via podcasts, a technology that has exploded since it got its name — combining iPod with broadcasting — in 2004.
But the majority of what is on the players is music.
Apple’s iTunes Music Store has sold more than 1 billion songs, at 99 cents each. And there are dozens of other ways, some legal, some not, to fill the iPods with tunes.
The Recording Industry Association of America estimates that the U.S. retail market for digitally downloaded songs and albums grew to $503.6 million in 2005 from $183.4 million in 2004.
IPods just seem ubiquitous.
According to the Consumer Electronics Association, just 15 percent of American households have a digital music player compared to 98 percent that own a television, 71 percent with a wireless phone and 73 percent with a personal computer.
Similarly, 599 million CDs were sold in the U.S. last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan, a number that dwarfs online music sales.
But the trend toward to Web-based purchase of music continues and the introduction of video is pushing the iPod market.
Investors quivered in the first quarter of 2005, worried that iPod sales would dramatically decline following the hot-selling holiday season. But Apple has sold more than 8.5 million iPods so far this year.
The bubble, in fact, hasn’t burst.
It’s getting bigger and more diverse.
“I probably listen to my iPod, real time, 22 hours a day. I spend about two hours in meetings when I’m not listening to it. But when I’m sleeping it’s on, and the rest of the day I’m listening. I have all kinds of different playlists for different things. It’s like a soundtrack to your life.”
That’s not a 20something who grew up with computers and digital music talking.
It’s 61-year-old Doug Evans.
The long-time member of the Lincoln Board of Education is on his fourth iPod, including a model that plays video content.
Evans sees the iPod as the next step in a musical progression that began when he was a kid growing up in a music-filled home, thanks to his music teacher mother. Evans played in bands and folk groups, taught guitar and has been a lifelong serious music listener.
“I’ve always tried to have at least one good stereo in the house,” Evans said. “From that perspective, it was a natural extension. 700 CDs on one of the big ones is just a third of the iPod, and I’ve got everything — classical, rock, folk music. I carry it around with me”
Evans uses the iPod’s playlist function to create specific packages of music. He has a playlist for a perfect day, based off late ’60s spring caroling that includes songs such as the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream” and Harper’s Bazaar’s version of “The 69th St. Bridge Song.”
His “sleep” playlist is 14 hours long and includes piano music by Debussy and Chopin along with jazz from trumpeter Chet Baker. “When you use it to go to sleep, your body gets attuned that,” he said. “I don’t think I know what the fourth song of that playlist is.”
He spent a recent night searching iTunes and other online music outlets for songs that he’d learned as a kid, creating a playlist he calls “comfort music.”
“It’s like drugs,” he said. “It’s so easy to do. You can easily spend $100 in a night.”
IPods are relatively simple devices. They’re basically a portable hard drive or, more recently, flash memory, a liquid crystal display, the software needed to convert the electronic data to sound and to “interface” with the user.
The mp3 files used to take music from the Web were around long before 2001. But Apple had the big idea first.
“Burning CDs of downloaded music is a headache. The natural solution is to copy it from hard drive to hard drive. Apple took the tiny Japanese hard drives just coming on to the market, slapped a nifty interface on them and provided a fast connection to suck music from the computer,” writes Wired News reporter Leander Kahney in his book “The Cult of iPod.”
Easy to use and beautifully designed, iPods were an instant hit. Expertly conceived and marketed, iPods became cultural icons while becoming must-have consumer items with auxiliary features that allow the players to be used in home and car stereos systems.
IPods have now gone through four generations of players. The newest models are smaller, more convenient and add video to the mix. A new model scheduled for release this summer will have a larger screen for video use.
Because it got the jump on competitors, Apple dominates the portable digital player market. Their iPods account for 78 percent of the portable digital players sold in the United States. Plenty of competitors are entering the market, but Apple has, so far, stayed ahead of the pack through its constant reworking of the iPod and what it offers.
A related entire industry has sprung up, providing everything from docking devices to plug iPods into home and car stereos, televisions, etc., to “skins” that cover the players with brightly colored thin packaging and people who will create playlists for those too busy to make their own.
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and that maxim holds true for iPods. For every type of user there’s a ’Pod to fit their needs.
Take Arlen Cho Root, 20, for example. He originally bought his iPod because he was tired of burning CDs of songs he downloaded.
“It’s a lot easier to transfer the music now,” he said. “Before getting the iPod, it just wasn’t as convenient. I couldn’t be mobile. Now I can take (music) anywhere.”
The same was true for Collin Paschall, 21, but he also needed music for his car.
“My CD player was skipping all the time,” he said. “Now I have one of those FM hookups that plugs into the cigarette lighter and broadcasts to my radio. It’s like its own little station for just my car.”
Brooke Masek, 21, didn’t see the point of carrying “thousands and thousands” of songs around when the iPod first came out. She just wanted a few of her favorites to carry around, and when Apple introduced the iPod Nano, Masek found her perfect player
“I didn’t see the point in having that much music on you,” she said. “I was waiting for one that didn’t have 40 gigs.”
Kelly Wagnitz, 20, also didn’t see a reason to carry around a large catalog of music. She wanted a device to listen to music while working out — something she wouldn’t have to fidget with much. Her choice? The iPod Shuffle, a lightweight, sleek model that carries fewer songs, but takes care of the music-mixing duties on its own.
“It randomly selects songs so I never know what I’m going to get,” she said. “I can just run and listen to music, and I don’t have to worry about it.”
The Deathray Davies is a Dallas-based garage rock band. Between the six band members, there are five iPods and two laptops. A hard touring outfit, the Deathray Davies spend week after week on the road, cruising down the highway with a soundtrack provided by the iPod of whomever is at the wheel.
“We’re listening to (shaker/noisemaker) Kevin Ingle’s right now — he’s at the helm of the van,” said drummer Robert Anderson during a cell-phone interview as the band drove through Arizona. “That’s the rule: If you’re driving, you’re in control with your iPod. If you don’t like it, put on your headphones.”
In the last two years, podcasts have gone from novel to a routine fixture of daily life.
Podcasts are the distribution of audio or video files over the internet via a subscription feed to be listened to or watched on portable devices, such as iPods, or computers.
“I’ve been listening to a lot of Ricky Gervais and NPR,” Masek said. “I usually download a bunch of them and listen to them all in a row.”
Once the domain of a few techies, podcasts are now ubiquitous, adopted by mainstream media including over-the-air broadcasters and newspapers, such as the Journal Star, which offers 16 different daily, weekly or bi-weekly podcasts
Podcasts have also made their way into academia, and UNL psychology professor Cal Garbin was one of the first local instructors to use the technology. Over the course of this semester, Garbin recorded his class lectures and uploaded them to a Web site that his Psychology 350 students could access.
But what’s most interesting about Garbin’s use of this iPod technology isn’t its implementation — it’s the fact he’s proving podcasting can be more than just a novel toy.
Garbin kept track of who used the audio files and how often, and now, at the end of the semester, he’s compiled definitive evidence of the technology’s benefits.
“We’ve got a performance increase that is tied to how much students use (the podcast lectures),” he said. “Same tests, same materials, and with just this stuff online we see a big jump in grades.”
He’s even found benefits for professors who take time to upload podcasts: The number of students who came to him days before tests for assistance has dropped from 60 or 70 students to just four or five.
“It’s pretty much wiped out people coming in and wanting their hand held while being walked through a problem, and that’s great,” he said.
And even though the podcasts could let students hear an entire semester’s worth of lectures while never setting foot in class, Garbin said he’s seen no significant drop in attendance.
“No place that we looked did we see a drop,” he said. “We’re looking for it, but we haven’t seen it yet.”
Certainly Garbin is an advocate of technology in classrooms, but he admits it’s not for everyone. It has to done right, he said, or it shouldn’t be done at all.
But done right, especially in today’s iPod-crazy student culture, Garbin is proving new technologies in the classroom will take learning to another level.
The most recent iPod feature to skyrocket is downloading of television shows and other videos to the portable players.
Increasingly popular, video on iPod allows users to watch shows whenever they have time. But they have to watch them on the player’s tiny, two-inch-wide screen.
“There’s something that’s very, very intimate about watching it,” said Evans, who is now watching all the episodes of “Battlestar Gallactica” on his iPod. “It’s a different experience. There are ways I like it more than I like watching the same thing on a big high-definition TV.”
The new iPod will have a wider screen, about four inches. Video also creates a larger demand on the iPod’s battery, causing it to run down far faster than just playing music.
There is another dark side to iPod video.
“My secret terrible thing is I’ve kind of become addicted to ‘Hannah Montana,’” Evans said of the Disney Channel program he regularly downloads. “It’s a cute concept. It’s not done very well. They’ve kind of sucked me into it.”
Using iPods for music, video and podcasts is pretty conventional.
Cathie Petsch has come up with a novel use for the iPod she bought herself for Christmas. She has some music on her iPod, but mostly she has photos — about 3,000 of them. And most of those photos are of her 2-year-old granddaughter.
“It’s my grandma’s brag book,” Petsch said. “I’m kind of obnoxious about it. You have all the pictures with you. It’s really fun to put it on slideshow and show the progress from the time she was just born until now.”
Petsch has passed the “brag book” tip on to other grandmothers and to some who are about to become grandmothers for the first time. It’s likely she’ll continue to use her iPod for that purpose for years to come.
“So far, it’s taken up two gigs (gigabytes) of it (the iPod),” Petsch said. “I can follow her until she graduates from college and put in pictures and still have room left.”
There are some in the financial community who believe that Apple’s stranglehold on the portable digital player market will inevitably come to an end. They predict that competitors will come up with cheaper players or players that are of the same quality as Apple’s and that consumers will eventually turn from the brand — something that has happened repeatedly in the consumer electronics business.
Regardless of the brand, within months there will be new technologies that utilize the portable digital players in new ways. And as broadband internet connections continue to increase, the number of iPods or competing devices sold are likely to continue to skyrocket.
After all, in Evans’ words, “What’s cooler than having 700 CDs and video in a thing the size of a cigarette case?”
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com and Joel Gehringer at 473-7254 or jgehringer@journalstar.com.
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