The New York Times has an amusing silly-season story about iPods. Specifically how a bunch of people are convinced that it's pre-programed to prefer certain tracks over others.
The evidence? Put your iPod on Shuffle and hear it for yourself.
Lucy Shaw, a social worker in New York, has stopped using Shuffle altogether. "It was totally not reading my moods," she said. It would play upbeat music when she was feeling low, and dark, somber selections when she was feeling upbeat. Furthermore, she said, her device had a penchant for picking songs containing four minutes of dead air followed by a bonus track - like Roxy Music's "More Than This" (the song to which Bill Murray sings karaoke in "Lost in Translation," a bonus track on the film's soundtrack album).
These people are not the only ones who think that iPods have minds of their own. IPod enthusiasts are throwing all manner of Shuffle conspiracy theories around on Internet message boards, ranging from the somewhat plausible to the absurd.
The truth, according to Apple, is much more boring:
if you listened on Shuffle to all 1,000 songs stored on an iPod Mini, you would theoretically never hear the same song twice, much the way you would never get two queens of hearts if you pulled cards from a single deck one by one. (Conversely, if you select Random on the iTunes Smart Playlist function, you might hear the same song twice in a row, though it is unlikely.)
But they would say that, wouldn't they?
But in the week where Freshers at Duke University are all given their own branded iPods, is preprogramming prefs into iPods such a silly idea?
In the case of Duke, they could ensure that students must listen to recorded lectures before rapping along with 50 Cent.
Or music companies could even subsidise iPod purchases to people who are known to be cool music sneezers in the community.
In return, these people would need to listen to new tracks from breaking artists or commit to a certain amount of music purchases from a specific label or artist. It's a little like operators subsidising handsets.
I'd like one please!
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