How Steve Jobs Changed Music, For Good and Ill

My colleague Kelefa Sanneh already summarized Jobs as the handmaiden of the single. Here are two other ways in which Job changed music.

  1. A Jobs thing that didn’t work out so well:

I love MP3 culture—the social and intellectual value of trading songs, and the democratic nature of a small file that can be accessed easily, especially in places that had less access to music when it was stored on a physical, breakable medium. (Look through recent record contracts and you will still find ghost clauses about the costs associated with breakages incurred by the shipment of 78-r.p.m. discs.) And despite their lower fidelity, MP3s often sound weirdly great coming out a computer connected to a Jawbone Jambox or even a decent set of cheap speakers. What sounds bad? iPod earbuds. They are vastly uncomfortable, render unpleasant versions of sounds that were once either euphonious or faithful to the original recording, and cause people to turn up the music way too loud to compensate for the zero fidelity. In turn, this caused many companies to make fancier, better earbuds as alternatives. Mostly this created a market for expensive and uncomfortable things.

Reasonably priced, traditional headphones began to make a comeback, leading to one of the few developments in commercially popular audio hardware not made by Apple: Beats By Dre headphones, overpriced and poofy headphones that allegedly save us from the hell of digital sound. Mostly they are very tight (especially on pumpkin heads like mine), break apart remarkably quickly, and obsessively add bass frequencies to music, a move that makes many records more pleasant at the physical level, but often obliterates whatever the recording was originally up to. Almost anything sounds good at low volume when made bassier, so we can maybe thank Dre for saving a few people from early tinnitus, but that’s about it.

  1. A Jobs thing that is great for music:

Shuffling. You have lots of music stored on your laptop and iPod, so much you can’t keep track of it. Which is exactly what makes shuffle work. Put your unwieldy collection on shuffle mode and you have a chance to hear music stripped of expectation (unless you have some kind of eidetic skill and can remember everything you’ve ever heard, even if only for a few seconds). Shuffle allows great random sequences to be generated, serial choices your inner d.j. would never have thought of, and it can reintroduce you to music that you once had some dumb prejudice against. Shuffle is a big, benevolent “Boo!”