Its Time to Give Your Old iPod a Second Life

The last handheld device to bring consciousness to everyday music-listening experience

by Andrey Sapozhnikov

In 2011, Spotify, then a local European startup, entered the U.S. market under the slogan: “It's how music was meant to be enjoyed. It's free and only one click away.” At the time, this claim seemed bold and slightly exaggerated. Media outlets questioned the competitiveness of the service and the sustainability of streaming as a business model.

Not a decade later, the one-click-away tagline became a matter of an unspoken public consensus. Music-streaming, which for about $10 a month gives subscribers access to 100 million songs, allows to curate playlists with friends and share cheeky Replay/Wrapped reports of their “listening personality” on social media, is the most convenient, cheapest, and easiest way to enjoy music in 2024. No one dares to argue with that (and I’m not planning to).

Streaming has liberated us from the expense of CDs and iTunes Store content, as well as the time-consuming process of importing albums from a computer or organizing audio files. Moreover, it has alleviated the burden of searching for music in general. Add one song to your Apple Music library, click the infinity icon, and the algorithms will find hundreds of similar tracks to suit your tastes.

Thirty years ago, a Sony Walkman EX508 owner, who had to carry around a handful of cassettes (that needed to be regularly removed and flipped), would not have dared to dream of such a thing. But does this modern-day magic, which allows an unlimited number of tracks to live on our wrist, have a downside? Where convenience, cheapness, and simplicity turn into temptation to start taking music for granted?

If you subscribe to a meal delivery service, your life becomes much easier. From now on, you will no longer have to go grocery shopping, buy kitchen utensils, or experiment with recipes. Specialists will choose an individualized program of proper nutrition for you and take care of all the logistical hassles. Convenient? Absolutely. Boring? Unimaginably.

Because comfort here is achieved by oversimplifying the human relationship with food—in other words, by stripping the process of cooking and eating of its creative component. A “weekly food box” subscription minimizes the likelihood of stumbling upon an Arabian bazaar during a food shopping trip, where one might buy dried loomi lime and later discover its charming harmony with basmati rice. It also reduces the chances of uncovering the sauce-holding properties of rough bronze-die pasta or exploring the city's gastronomic underground. The food subscribers deprive themselves of these experiences in exchange for saving time and energy.

Which is quite understandable, given that many people do not consider eating as a creative process at all, but rather a utilitarian tool for preventing death from starvation. Although music-streaming and meal kit companies differ in product, their core philosophy remains the same: simplification.

This is not a bad thing per se. But what is concerning is that in 2024, streaming, with smartphones as the primary playback device, became the sole option for music consumption. This scenario is troubling because it confines Apple Music subscribers to the same limited musical choices that a Blue Apron dinner service imposes on its client base.

Streaming has eradicated significant perceptual aspects from our interaction with music. Gone are the days when David Letterman would tap his pen on the jewel case of Moby’s “Play,” urging you to take a sick day and head to the music store to grab your own copy. Now there's no need to venture anywhere, search for, or purchase anything—it's all included in your Spotify subscription. Convenient? Absolutely. Boring? Well, unimaginably.

With these thoughts in mind, in the winter of 2024, I decided to bring a pinch of musical consciousness back into my streaming-centric life, for which I had two approaches: radical-audiophile and moderate. The radical-audiophile path consisted of buying a Walkman player from the 1990s and switching completely to physical media—great in theory, terrible in practice.

Cassette and even CD players are hopelessly obsolete. Almost all vintage models require headphones with oddly shaped plugs, expensive repairs with the replacement of rare parts that have been out of stock literally anywhere for at least two decades, a special transformer to charge the battery, and not to mention extreme stabilization while walking or running. In other words, far too much engagement.

I sought a versatile and, most importantly, portable solution. Steve Jobs addressed the cost and lack of portability associated with physical media as far back as 2001 when he offered his solution to this problem: the iPod. My choice was the moderate path. Outdated, yet not quite retro—meaning not so antiquated as to evoke discomfort. Demanding attention and time, but not to an extent that proves bothersome. Truly handheld, aesthetically pleasing, and affordable. In essence, the ideal pre-streaming device for everyday music enjoyment.

When I told my friends about the decision to start using an iPod after five years of consistent Apple Music subscription renewal, the feedback I received ranged from “very stylish Y2K gesture” to “pretentious digital necrophilia.” As Sam Machkovech wrote for The Atlantic in 2010, “The idea of holding a cell phone in one hand and a music player in the other will become an antiquated laugh soon enough.” And it definitely has.

Which is why the iPod is the best device for experiencing what I like to call digital downshifting. A conscious escape from the mainstream way of content consumption, starting with the fact that with the acquisition of an iPod, you obtain a dedicated device exclusively for music—and nothing but the music.

“It is stolidly oblivious to the internet and its galaxy of distractions. It knows nothing of the cloud,” as Dorian Lynskey expressed the virtues of his iPod Classic for The Guardian in 2022. I obtained my own iPod Classic this April while journeying through Georgia during the mass anti-government protests. Amidst the throngs of protesters outside the parliament, I encountered a Facebook Marketplace vendor, gave him $50, and navigated through the crowd accompanied by Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Sky,” the first song shuffle play greeted me with as I powered on the device.

It was unforgettable—and what preserved this magical moment was the iPod Classic’s blissful ignorance of annoying notifications, subscription requirements to access a media library, and the phenomenon known as the internet. All it knows is how to store and play music.

And that’s what makes it reminiscent of a mobile devices generation that hadn’t yet sparked conversations about influence on human development and concentration. All iPods, except for the latest iPod Touch models, which are essentially iPhones without SIM card slots, are excellent tools for FOMO prophylaxis, as they take over the key multimedia functions of the smartphone while setting aside all its attention-span-killing capabilities. Take your iPod for a walk and rest assured that for the next few hours you won’t be pestered by workplace chats in Slack or tempted to post something on BeReal or Instagram—you’ll be alone with your thoughts and your music. And you’d be surprised at how radically different the experience is, for a variety of non-apparent reasons.

What frustrates me most about streaming services is their inevitable subordination to questionable, anti-creative regulations of the music industry. I was unlucky enough to be born in Russia, and I vividly recall how in 2022, just weeks after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, half of the songs I had collected over the years vanished from my Apple Music library, and new releases from my favorite artists stopped appearing on my profile. Literally, I, a 19-year-old student from Moscow, lost the opportunity to listen to a new Pet Shop Boys single because Putin had gone insane. Songs that had soundtracked my travels, joys, loves, and the best times of my life—songs that had become an integral part of my identity—were suddenly inaccessible.

The realization hit: I never actually owned those songs. Apple Music is no more than a collection of files in the cloud that I can access for a fee, as long as I have an internet connection. Once the network goes down, I’m out of music. Once I stop paying for the subscription or decide to change Apple ID region, I lose my music library. But with the iPod, I don’t have to worry about that.

Even if you use Apple’s official method of filling it with content—synchronizing albums you’ve bought from iTunes—you can be confident they’ll stay in your iPod forever. You’ve already purchased that music and transferred it into the offline sphere: it will survive wars, half-witted dictators, copyright disputes, and major-label squabbles.

In the past few months, almost all of Genesis’ albums, all of Vengaboys’ songs, Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing,” and the iconic female vocal sample from Snap!’s “The Power!” have mysteriously disappeared from my Apple Music playlists. And I would have been delighted to complain about the blatant invasion of my privacy, but it’s absurd—the very concept of streaming is built on the illusion of ownership, the illusion of having and controlling “my” music.

The iPod is a way of saying goodbye to those illusions because, like a Y2K Prometheus, it takes the tools of possession and control away from the industry and gives them back to the user. “My iPod contains many songs that streaming does not acknowledge: forgotten B-sides culled from old CD singles, bootleg remixes plucked from filesharing platforms, sundry rarities downloaded from now-defunct websites, albums snarled up in copyright issues, the catalogues of Spotify exiles Neil Young and Joni Mitchell,” Dorian Lynskey recalled in his “RIP the iPod” op-ed—and I very much understand what he means.

With the acquisition of the iPod, songs long forgotten due to the limitations of streaming services have returned to my headphones: glam-era Pantera albums digitized from vinyl records, old CD compilations from German Bravo magazine, lostwave tracks, and countless mashups, remixes, Japan-only mini-albums, etc. Bringing such marginalized compositions back into my everyday playlist has proven to be an incredibly satisfying and enjoyable experience, both in terms of the process and the result.

To get a desired song displayed on the iPod, you must initially obtain it as a file—which, for someone in 2024, could already turn into a tremendous adventure. Once you’ve found the track, you can customize it by adding cover art, genre, lyrics, and other basic information. Unlike Apple Music moderators, who broadly categorize almost any subgenre of rock music simply as “rock,” you are free to approach this task with greater enthusiasm. You might choose a scan of a cassette tape booklet issued for the Australian market in the 1980s as the cover art, and select a genre like “Buttrock Goa” from Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.

All of this may seem like childishness or an unnecessary complication of life, but that is precisely the point of digital downshifting. You could just open the fridge, put a hamburger from a meal box delivered by courier into the microwave, and consume it immediately. But you chose the harder route and cooked the dish yourself, studying the best cheddar sauce recipes, carefully selecting ingredients at the store, and using a kitchen meat thermometer for the first time in your life. I don’t think it’s worth specifying which dish you’ll eat with more gusto.

With music, it’s much the same. While using streaming services, at one point I was horrified to find that I began to perceive my library as a 24-hour fast-food restaurant—or, to draw a more digital analogy, as an Instagram Reels feed. As an endless content stream, the infinity essence of which makes its individual elements lose their value. I found myself regularly skipping songs straight to the choruses, switching them every few seconds, and adding or removing entire playlists without much thought. It was as if my favorite songs and artists had been reduced to primitive tools for satisfying some kind of audio hunger, and this devaluation deeply unsettled me.

The situation with the iPod is quite different, precisely because of the effort required to upload music into it. The mere act of plugging in a USB cord to your computer to synchronize with the player adds significant subjective value to the tracks you import because you have invested time, a tangible amount of money (in the case of iTunes), and your creativity (in the case of searching and designing the file yourself) in them. As a result, you are more inclined to listen to songs without rewinding or skipping, and to do so more attentively and consciously. The filler tracks naturally fade from your playlist over time, as you simply won’t want to spend even a couple of minutes adding them to your media library—now there’s only room left for gems.

In comparison with the fast-food analogy above, it’s not accidental that I mentioned “24/7”—it’s an important conceptual detail. The great merit of streaming is the elimination of any barriers between the listener and the discographies of artists. I happened to be somewhere in the mountains of Lebanon when MGMT’s latest album Loss of Life was released—and I was able to listen to it right after Apple Music sent me a push notification. While this may be a practice we now deem normal, in the mountainous Mediterranean setting, it seemed like a miracle. But how can a miracle be so easily accessible?

Consider yourself in the shoes of the audience of the Late Show with David Letterman in 2000. Letterman demonstrates Moby’s new CD Play, praises it, and even recommends the audience take a sick day to go to the store to pick it up. Then Moby himself appears in the studio, joined by Gwen Stefani, and together they perform “South Side.”

And even if you really liked that song and wanted to hear Play in its entirety, you’d really have to run to the Virgin Megastore the next day after work to get your copy—and you’d better hurry up because Moby is in high demand. You might have to take an early day off work and use the checkout counter in the classical music department at Virgin, as John Seabrook recalled in Nobrow, because the queues were much smaller there. Finally, when you arrive home, you eagerly pop the first CD into your player. You flip through the booklet featuring images of a jumping Moby and read the accompanying mini-essays about fundamentalism, veganism, and the Holocaust Museum in Manhattan with “Honey” playing in the background. And you realize that Letterman was right—it was all worth it.

Of course, the iPod would hardly evoke the full range of emotions associated with buying a CD in the early 2000s, but it does allow you to reconnect with an important existential aspect of it. Specifically, the impossibility of instant gratification of the audio hunger to which streaming services have accustomed us.

Do you want to listen to The Smiths? “Sure,” Spotify will readily respond and present their entire discography. The remastered albums, curated playlists of the best hits compiled by the band themselves, even a “sad girl starter pack” playlist featuring The Smiths, and for good measure, the same offerings focused solely on Morrissey. “Well, I’m afraid it doesn’t make me smile,” I wish I could retort. Because is it convenient? Absolutely. Boring? Unimaginably.

On the other hand, should you suddenly crave The Smiths amidst Mount Lebanon’s scenery but find them absent from your iPod library, here begins a journey. Descend from the mountains first. Then delve into their discography, perhaps even watching music videos and reading band history and album reviews. Next, acquire or download selected songs based on your research, import them to your iPod via cable, and only then indulge in listening. After enduring hours of longing for The Smiths, intensified by the frustration of digital abstinence foreign to 2024—when content doesn’t magically appear but requires active pursuit—The Smiths, I assure you, sound profoundly different.

And this increased threshold for entry for songs into the library has sparked an intriguing phenomenon, one you’ll likely encounter if you acquire an old iPod on Facebook Marketplace or eBay. Out of the three iPods procured there, I exclusively employ the iPod Nano for importing my own music. A perfectly portable version that feels much nicer in the pocket than the 240-gram iPhone 14 Pro Max when jogging. In my iPod Touch 4th gen and iPod Classic, I maintain the libraries of their previous owners as a matter of principle.

For a mere $20–50, I accessed the digital embodiments of two strangers’ lives with impeccable music taste, considering them as autobiographical novels, meticulously crafted over years with a profound affection in the language of hand-curated, thoughtfully selected albums. These novels introduced me to the enchanting French nu-disco band L’Impératrice, now among my favorites, prompted me to finally give a serious listen to Lana Del Rey, whom I had previously overlooked out of snobbery, and afforded me the opportunity to explore the entire Kraftwerk discography on a Zurich–Hamburg night bus.

Streaming services don’t entirely deprive me of the opportunity, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where I’d open Apple Music on my iPhone and listen to the same artist for more than ten hours, fully immersed with no distractions. The vast streaming library, with its 100,000-song limit, makes me feel like a child in a free toy store. I rush in ecstatically, trying to play with action figures, cars, and construction sets all at once, but end up not dedicating myself to anything specific and quickly losing interest in this kind of shopping. The iPod, however, sets clear boundaries: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” These limits make me a more selective listener and playlist curator. As someone born in Russia, I know the pitfalls of feeling limitless.

And when preparing for a trip or a long walk, I choose my iPod like a book to go, setting myself up in advance to consciously listen to a certain artist, album, or genre. It’s a very pleasant, sober experience, where there is still a place for streaming services. I use them as a handy catalog, to share music with friends, and for situational listening via Bluetooth speakers or CarPlay. The result is a sweet harmony that has, without exaggeration, enhanced my already good relationship with music.

Which started back in 2009, with the iPod Nano my parents gave me for my seventh birthday. I still remember being on vacation with my family at a café in Brussels when a girl at a nearby table had her phone ring with Mylène Farmer’s “Regrets” chorus as the ringtone. It played long enough that, in 2024, Shazam would have instantly recognized it and provided me with a direct link to Spotify. But in 2009, things were different.

I had to beg my older sister to come with me to ask the girl for the name of the song I liked so much, and we managed to get a napkin with the title written in pencil. Later that evening at the hotel, my sister informed me that, regretfully, she couldn’t download “Regrets” to my iPod because she didn’t find it available online. So the next day, pocketing that very same napkin along with the €10 bill originally set aside for a trip to McDonald’s, I desperately headed to the nearest record store. The owner was so touched by a little boy’s willingness to spend his last pocket money on a music album that the 1990s edition of L’Autre came home with me for free that day.

It was only then that we managed to import “Regrets” from the CD, along with nine, as it turned out, equally delightful songs, onto the iPod, and I chose the picture of the back of the CD with Mylène’s eyes closed as the cover. What an irrational, unbelievable happiness it was.

That CD with a napkin inside is still in my room at my parents’ house, and L’Autre remains my favorite album of all time. It’s a pity that the Shazam–Spotify scenario didn’t work back then. Everything could have been much simpler.

Only one click away.