It's Possible

iPods and other portable digital players may be obsolete with the increasing ability of smartphones, iPhones, and the like to have the same capability.

Frankly, though, I will keep my few vinyl albums and my CDs and my iPods because they all serve different purposes.

I am surprised illegal downloading is still hugely popular:

Not that some diehards don’t still cling to their turntables and CDs. Vinyl album sales have surged in recent years, driven by connoisseurs, audiophiles and young music listeners longing for a deeper, more tactile connection to the music they love. But digital music files now dominate the retail market, which is to say Apple Inc. dominates the digital market.

In the pre-digital music world, acquiring music below the mainstream radar involved something akin to a treasure hunt. If you grew up in a small town or rural area especially, you often had to chase the music, sometimes taking months or years to find a rare limited-edition single by a favorite punk band or an out-of-print album by German art-rockers from the ‘70s. There was lasting value attached to the prize, a physical artifact that became part of your life, a piece of music that also functioned as a small, relatively affordable piece of art.

Now that virtually any song, no matter how obscure, can be located with a couple of clicks, some pundits argue that the iPod has become cooler than the music it contained. Consumers fill their sleekly designed, increasingly compact music players with thousands of songs that are continually recycled. The tracks are listened to over marginally adequate ear buds on an inferior format (MP3 files contain less sonic information than a CD or vinyl album), often to complement other activities.

Despite the emergence of the iTunes store and other on-line retail music outlets, the vast majority of music acquired digitally is done through file-sharing. Many first-generation iPod listeners have no problem buying and replacing their iPods, putting hundreds of dollars in Apple’s pocket for the hardware. But they fill them with music acquired free through illicit channels, which the music industry says has contributed mightily to its huge revenue losses in the last decade.

I download, but mostly single tracks and not entire albums. If there is an album I want, I get the CD or vinyl. Period.