How Steve Jobs Changed Music Forever

With all that’s been said about the late Steve Jobs over the past week, I am left with the lingering feeling that there’s not much left to say. The tributes, obituaries, eulogies—whatever you’d like to term them—have focused (rightly so!) on the magnitude of Jobs’s contributions to the business and marketing sides of the technology industry. But perhaps not enough has been said about the other aspect of his career: how he changed our cultural understanding of music.

The iPod, of course, was not the first .mp3 player on the market. But it was the sleekest and the most consumer-friendly, providing a comfortable, integrated system along with iTunes (on either a Macintosh or a Windows operating system) and the iTunes Store. The popularity of the iPod was, and still is, unprecedented. As Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman point out in their fantastic commemorative article on Jobs in the most recent issue of Time magazine, even the white iPod earphones themselves became a fixture in American society.

But Jobs’s contributions to music are larger than that. While the iPod had important ramifications for music lovers—the obsolescence of the CD, the physical condensation of the music collection, the overall mobility of music—but more than anything, the major long-term change effected by Jobs’s neat little device is on the way we think about music in the first place.

One of those changes is already obvious: more than before, music has clearly become a badge of identity since the introduction of the iPod. Of course, music has, to some extent, always been a badge of identity for people. There have been followers of bands and musical artists since the early days of classical music; we only have to look back a generation to the “Deadhead” phenomenon to get a sense of how enthusiastically people associate themselves with their preferred music. Not only that, but people have engaged in legendary tiffs over their musical likes and dislikes for centuries. Taking music to be an important part of one’s identity is nothing new. But the appearance of the iPod has brought the strong ties of that identity into a new era.

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For instance, how many times have you looked through a friend’s iPod (or iTunes, for that matter)? I’ll go out on a limb and guess that you’ve done this on more than one occasion. A harder question: What runs through your mind as you look at those songs?

Depending, I suppose, on how judgmental a person you are (I am known among my friends to be pretty critical…), there are certain thoughts that pass through your mind. When you flick through a friend’s iPod who you know loves Top 40 radio, it would come as a minor shock to see something like The Tallest Man On Earth. Conversely (or almost conversely…whatever), you’d have a similar reaction flicking through the iPod of your hipster friend and uncovering a Britney Spears album.

Those may be exaggerated examples, but they seem to me emblematic of this badge of identity constructed by the existence of the iPod. The music on your iPod becomes integral towards the formation of a musical identity. I do admit that my argument operates on some shaky premises and is, in some senses, simplistic. People don’t have all the music they like on their iPods—sometimes they don’t even have their favorite music on their iPods. I have one friend who periodically exchanges all the music on his iPod by lending it to a friend and letting that friend supply a new batch of tunes, so any possibility of seeing his musical identity through his iPod is…well…tough.

But then again, the tendency to “read” the music on an iPod in relation to its owner is certainly out there. The device is understood to reflect the owner in some sense. Another friend of mine, who was embarking on a nine-month journey, needed to pick 125 songs to put on her IPod Shuffle. Although I was not privy to the final music selection or how she felt about it, I have little doubt that she chose to put some of her favorite music on there. (Then again…it is a Shuffle, so you can’t look through the songs and it’s not exactly representative of an entire music collection…)

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Another change wrought by the iPod is the way in which music, for some people, has become a component of one’s sonic reality. Perhaps living on a college campus exaggerates this tendency, but lots of students walk from one place to another with those distinctive iPod earphones in their ears (and many others, obviously, with different earphones). The typical cultural criticism to make about this practice is to point out how disconnected these people become from their surroundings. In some ways, one can read this use of music as a purposeful self-isolation.

But the other way to look at this practice is to note its concurrent effect on the music itself. Ironically, the mobility of music changes the value of music. Music becomes part of the sonic reality—a step above the sound of rustling leaves or passing cars—but I can’t help but feel that it somehow cheapens the experience. The same goes for running or exercising with music. While I understand and appreciate the ostensible value of “pump-out” music in its ability to push people towards a better workout, I think that “pump-out” music shares the same basis as “walking-to-class” music.

[Having been on a number of athletic teams in high school, I know the value of a good song before heading out to the field for a game or practice, but I never understood how a half-hour of loud music (whether rap, hip-hop, rock, country, pop, or house music) really pumped anyone up for the big game. It always seemed to me more like the practice of walking-to-class music.]

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I’m not here to offer any pronouncements of good and evil on the part of Steve Jobs due to the changes wrought by the iPod (though there is some editorializing…), but rather to recognize that, while Jobs certainly understand how to market the product and, perhaps better than anyone, understood what the consumers wanted, he didn’t see the long-term effects on the medium of music itself.