It’s been a bit hectic, what with the final two weeks of the MBA approaching, but somewhere in there I managed to download iTunes for Windows. A millionth of a second after launching the newly-installed application, I proceeded to uninstall WinAmp, saying my goodbye quickly so as not to betray my lack of emotion at its departure from my hard-drive. You know Apple is onto something when not only am I deleting the first application I’ve installed on any new machine for the past five years, but even my mother-in-law is looking at buying an iPod.
Now, I’m not one to advocate or admit to mass copyright piracy via a public medium, so let’s just say that I have a sizable digital music collection and leave it at that. But, needless to say, iTunes makes my music addiction a bit more manageable. I can sort! I can shuffle! I can even track which songs I really like, in case I get smacked in the head and forget! It’s lovely. Other people apparently think so too. While pretending to get some work done in the university library, I fired up iTunes only to be surprised by the number of other computers sharing out their music using the application’s built-in streaming capabilities. As Inspector Gadget said to Penny: Yowza!
The most interesting part about trawling through other people’s iTunes libraries is observing the variety of music to which people listen: Mozart, Pink, AC/DC, Britney Spears, Oscar Peterson, and so on. And that’s on one machine. People are shamelessly mixing and matching musical genres in their playlists with wild abandon – crazy! It’s refreshing to see so much variety in people’s musical tastes, even if some of the combinations are liable to make them as sick as a drink made from Scotch, Vodka, and Gin and served from an unclean toilet bowl. To those musical pioneers who are about to mix Joni Mitchell with a side of AC/DC and some Pavarotti: I salute you!
Apparently, my acceptance for this musical cross-breeding is not shared by all, and the latest Apple-inspired revolution has an ugly name: playlistism. That’s right, we’ve reached the level of social sophistication where judging a person on the basis of race, gender, religion, nationality, and political affiliation is not enough. We’ve pushed the boundary: now we can judge you by your previously-secret addiction to kitschy show tunes! Point and laugh everybody!