Music Players – Objects of Anxiety

Worries about personal music players go beyond volume, though—far beyond. “Moral panics” related to music are nothing new (think Elvis, rock’n’roll, the Beatles, death metal, raunchy rap, etc.), but it’s still astonishing just how much anxiety is poured into these tiny devices. Consider the various worries that surround them:

• They’re destroying music: “All recorded music is a compromise,” said the chief music critic for the UK Times earlier this year. “But recorded music that has been turned into a computer file, squeezed down the internet and then scrunched into a tiny part of your zillion-track iPod is more compromised than most.” It was only one more volley in the war between the audiophiles and the “good enough” set.
• They’re making narcissists of us all: Who needs to interact with other people on the street or the subway? Or listen to a song they dislike? Portable media players mean that we can listen to our own libraries all the time, and some people argue that there’s a dark side to this much control. In the 2009 book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement, Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell argue that “it can’t be a coincidence that i in iPod and iMac can stand for the first-person singular.”
• They’re killing the music business: Music players now have so much storage that (according to Microsoft), some models can cost $30,000 to fill with tunes. Of course, no one spends that kind of money on music, and rightsholders believe that the devices are largely filled with illegal content instead—Universal even talked Microsoft into giving it a buck from every Zune sale to compensate for this.
• They’re going to be confiscated at the border: When news broke about the negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), inflammatory headlines about “iPod-scanning border guards” popped up. The idea was that rightsholders were pushing governments to look for infringing content at customs crossings, and agents would therefore start scanning iPods for such content. This never made much sense—agents don’t have the time, nor do they have any reliable way of knowing if particular tracks are legal copies—but it quickly made the rounds and succeeded at illustrating just how seriously people took their music collections and personal playback devices.

Also, they could destroy your hearing.