In 2000, for my first time living in Hamburg, I lugged my entire CD collection along with me from the States in a giant zippered case. This time, thanks to the wonders of advancing technology, I've traded the giant zippered case (which would now have to be considerably larger) for eight gigabytes of hard-disk space: before we left, I downloaded iTunes for Windows and 'burned' (or is it 'ripped'? I don't know what the cool kids call it) all the CDs onto my laptop, letting me safely leave the majority of my CDs in storage while still providing me with an endless music source at work.
iTunes automatically compiles a top-25-most-listened-to list of songs: after three months of leaving it on random play and skipping through songs I'm not interested in, I've finally created a top-25 list that's not a random mishmash and is actually representative of my tastes:
Another feature of iTunes is that you can 'share' your music on your local network -- people using iTunes on other computers can listen to, but not copy, the songs in your local library. Since my office is full of Macheads, there are a lot of shared playlists for me to browse, and I can see what the average Hamburger is listening to. There's a lot of the predictable techno, but what always surprises me is how many of my co-workers love rap. Once I got into the car of my boss-at-the-time to drive somewhere -- he's a home-owning family man in his mid-30s, who always dresses in a crisply buttondown style, like a model for a German Land's End catalog, but when he turned the key of his BMW, out blasted the high-volume rap music.
You'd think that my iTunes library, heavy on the folk and acoustic side of things, would be completely ignored. But one day I checked to see if anyone was looking at my library, and eight people were connected! I seem to be serving some sort of unmet need. It's a shame that iTunes doesn't provide you with a way to see exactly what songs your remote listeners are listening to ...
Posted by Kevin at April 24, 2004 08:52 AM