My father called me last night, outraged. ""Can you believe this? They're selling pre-loaded iPods. Pre-loaded!""
I wasn't sure what to say.
First, I'd never heard of a ""pre-loaded"" iPod (other than the U2 one from a while back), and secondly, even if such a thing did exist, I wasn't sure what ethical or aesthetic objections my father had.
So, knowing the two words would set him off, I replied, ""So what?""
And I got my answers. First, yes, pre-loaded iPods do exist. They're not exactly from Apple, but they are sold from various websites (e.g. Joyci.com) that buy new iPods, load up music, and then ship it out to the buyer. Whether this is entirely legal is questionable—Joyci's pre-loaded music comes from the iTunes Apple Store, so it's not even like it's theft, per se, but because it's digital music, a whole different slew of laws and restrictions apply. So, it's a legally gray area.
However, the legality of the thing wasn't Dad's issue. What he took offense to was the notion of pre-loaded ""genre"" iPods.
See, the way you get a pre-loaded iPod is that you either a) tell the website what songs you want loaded or b) you select a genre (e.g. Jazz, Punk, Hip-Hop, Classic Rock, etc.) and the iPod shows up at your door with some kind of pre-bundled package of songs.
After this lengthy explanation, I still wasn't sure what he was objecting to.
""Doesn't that make you sick,"" he asked again. ""That people would want to buy something pre-loaded?""
I finally asked him to explain his position rather than simply display outrage.
His argument ran something like this: if people are so lazy that they need to have someone else decide what music they should listen to, then they shouldn't be in the business of listening to music at all. Deciding what music you wish to listen to, like deciding what books to read or what clothes to wear, is part of identity-formation, and what does that say about someone's identity when they willingly—eagerly, in fact—give up that part of themselves to some anonymous website? How lazy must one be, Dad argued, to give up the joys of finding and discerning the types of music one likes and simply succumbing to a pre-packaged prescription?
If this sounds a little extreme, please understand my father is a life-long music aficionado: he manages an independent record store, and has, in one way or another, been part of the music industry for the past twenty years or so. He's a fanatic, not unlike ultra Orthodox Jews or fans of the TV show ""Lost,"" so by being his offspring, I saw where he was coming from.
However, I had—and maintain—a few objections. First of all, just because an iPod comes pre-loaded with music does not mean that that is all the person owning the iPod listens to. It's a base. If you select the Jazz package, and end up with, say, a Thelonius Monk album you really hate, you can obviously delete it, and—also obviously—you can add whatever Miles Davis albums the thing didn't come with and etc., etc., etc. Secondly, as to the argument of ""how dare this anonymous source tell me what I should like,"" do we not do this every time we purchase a collection of short stories, or a greatest hits album?
Someone somewhere—be it the editor of the collection pulling from various magazines around the country or a producer in a studio pulling from various songs throughout history/genre, etc.—is dictating what they believe to be ""good for"" the consumer. So what's the problem with letting a website suggest 100 or 1,000 songs you may or may not like?
Anyhow, Dad and I went round and round on this for a good half an hour. It was a heated debate—tears were involved, veiled threats were made, but in the end we had to agree to disagree. I just hope my tuition is still covered.
