More than just gigabytes
I was talking to a friend about tech devices we had over the years and my old SanDisk Sansa m200 came up. 512mb of storage could hold about 88 songs. Sure, there were iPods at the time that could hold over 10,000 songs, but who really needs that many?
Now my phone has 128gb to store over 30,000 songs, but I don't even need it in order to access all music ever released. That's because cheaper and faster technology transformed how we consume and interact with media.
What you listened to was always curated by you and it took an hour or two for 88 songs to download. Your menu was linear, so sometimes you had to skip 20 songs to find the one you wanted to hear next. Now your phone can instantly choose what plays next and making a playlist takes the amount of time it takes to search for the songs.
Nostalgia aside, waiting never felt all that great. Maybe there was a greater sense of ownership picking through songs carefully. Delayed gratification is a good way to fight a poor attention span. But I'm not sure it's better to lose access to finding the exact song I want to hear on the way to the store. Or hearing a favorite artist's new album the day it's released. Or discovering a new song I like through the algorithm.
No one really needs 10,000 songs on any given day. What the tech showed us was just how enticing a buffet can be.
