With the advent of the iPod and iTunes, the internet was playing an increasingly vital role in our media consumption. We were no longer tied to brick and mortar stores to purchase and discover new music, we merely had to think about a band we liked,punchthatinformation into www.google.com and travel down that rabbit hole. A rabbit hole that would provide you a vast amount of content for whomever you searched for, which at first glace would appear to be a blessing, and would later become somethingofa curse. Not only did we not need to purchase physical media, or carry around a suitcase to enjoy our music collections, but with that same search, we could quickly discover new music. Great, right?
Stop and think about what the internet has had a hand in. The death of the music store, thanks to Apple and their powerful iTunes / iPod combination which has given us the ability to shed the excess packaging of physical media and to embrace digital music. Then it helped usher out the Music Magazines such as (but not limited to) Blender, Chart, and Spin, as music blogs (such as this one) popped up to talk about the wealth of music that exists in the world. Lastly the internet helped spawn the musical pirate and musical hoarders, the pirates took the concept of music discovery and perverted it to such an extent that you can now at any given point of the day download whatever your musical whim desires. With this ability to download whatever you want to hear, lends itself to the musical hoarder who has built such a music stockpile it would take them many years over to listen to it all, they aren’t necessarily fans but just listened to a track and threw it onto the pile.
While the internet broke down all of the physical media needs of the Music Geek, it has given us the ability to quickly discover new music and to communicate with others about those bands. People were amassing vast music collections, that took up no more space than a paperback novel with little thought or consideration for what they were downloading. Thanks in part to these abilities, the appetite of the music geek had increased exponentially, to a point of it almost being ravenous. Not much thought it being put into what is flowing from the headphones, we just needed something, anything. Which begs the question, how much music is too much? When was the last time someone got stuck on one album for months at a time? The internet still serves as a great discovery tool, but how much music can a music geek churn through?
