Here's my two pennys on the whole iPod debate. The one angle I rarely hear discussed is how the sudden availability of a large resource of music effects listening habits.
I listen to my net-md minidisc all day at work and love having 35 or so songs on a disc in LP2 to create the ultimate mix "tape". I then have 5 or 6 or these mixes and over the months have gradually weeded out the songs I don't care for as much, until my minidiscs are overflowing with only the purest musical goodness.
The Hi-Md format offering a gig a disc or increased storage on a regular disc feels like a natural next step for me, allowing me to cover an 8 hour work day with great music.
On the flip-side - everyone I know who has an iPod seems to have more music that they know what to do with at hand all the time, but still somehow seem to get bored of stuff. Furthermore, a lot of iPod users end up skipping through the album "filler" tracks to get to the album "hits", whereas I feel like I've leteraly squeezed my music listening down to the solid gold songs, and then when I want to listen to albums, I can still get 3 full length on one "themed" disc.
Personally I don't feel the need to have that much music at hand all the time. A lot of iPod users I know (here in NYC I'm surrounded by them) are file swapping and literally filling up their new iPods with 20-40Gb of a friend's music collection overnight - is that anyway to cherish music? I feel like every album I bought tells a story, reminds me of a place, and furthermore got the listening it deserved to sink into my psyche / or got ditched as a result. This notion of "aquiring" music seems to be getting lost with the advent of these high-capacity devices.
Just a thought.
