podding

How seriously can you take a university that teaches classes on iPods? Really! :D I mean, ... listen to this: "... for the first time allows you to create your own auditory world bla bla" What? I mean doh. This is what you're teaching university students? I mean, I would feel intelectually insulted if someone attempted to lecture something like that to me. Well, actually I did a couple of times, but that's another story. Dude! What kind of university students are those who can't figure out for themselves that a music player coupled with a digital music library/store allows you to create your own auditory world? It's silly to have a course about that, and it's discrediting to the university, at least in my view. But then again, I guess they have a lot of courses on even more trivial subjects. So it's no wonder that a lot of people who claim to be experts in some field actually have little idea of what they're doing. Take the music "industry" for instance. When Steve Jobs launched the iPod and iTunes, he had to work hard to convince them to allow music to be bought off the Internet. Then he had to work even harder to convince them to allow the purchase of individual songs rather than full albums. The man knew what he was doing, and the enormous commercial success of his idea is proof of that. But people who counted and who should have really known better didn't initially approve of his idea, and that was plain stupid. I mean, here is this huge economy ruled by people who we're supposed to credit for its functioning, right? We should trust that they know what they're doing, that they do everything to ensure that everything goes well. Hell, this is so stupid. One day a man comes and states the plain obvious -- you're doing it all wrong! This is how it should be done! And it works, and the numbers speak for themselves. But it took someone like Jobs to actually implement such an idea, not because it hadn't been thought of before, but because he had the necessary charisma and influence. And one might think that "artists" (I somehow hate that word in its modern meaning) should be, well, you know, smart people. They should feel the world around them, they should be aware of their fans' opinions and feelings. But no, you had big names saying that no, albums are "thematic" and shit, and they should be sold as a whole, not broken up into songs. Why? Probably because the record house said so, and that's degrading to an artist's status. Everybody knows that people like to select the songs they listen to and build playlists and shit. It's been done that way for a long, long time, ages before the iPod, with MP3s. But some are unwilling to acknowledge that. I mean, people buy CDs, the companies get their money, then they vocally bash illegal downloads (which probably got the buyer to buy the CD in the first place), and it kind of works, so why actually encourage legal downloads? Why offer a service that actually fits like a glove over what the users actually want? I mean, if the billions are pouring in, then fuck the consumers, as long as they consume. Right.