Bigger, yes. Better...?

I mentioned before that I had bought an 80GB iPod. This has allowed me a certain amount of freedom in uploading. With my 4GB Nano, I had to weed through albums, find my favourite four or five songs and upload those. That meant that I had to predict which 400 songs I wanted to listen to in any given day, which sounds easier than it was. Like two weeks ago, when I wanted to listen through Tokyo Police Club’s Elephant Shell but couldn’t because I had only picked my top five songs. Or those random times in July when I really want to listen to Christmas music, but can’t because it didn’t make sense to load Christmas songs on my iPod. The most irritating thing was having two or three album’s worth of material that I have to learn for a freelance gig taking up space from music that I actually want to listen to.

Now I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum, where my iPod is filled with songs I haven’t listened to in years (or in some cases, ever). For example, there’s an artist I met a few years ago who gave me his CD and asked me to send it to whoever I wanted in hopes that he could score some shows. I dutifully uploaded it onto my compy (and therefore my iTunes) and sent it around and haven’t listened to it since, because it’s not the best (I won’t give you the name because this person has since released an excellent album and is doing well in Toronto right now, so you don’t need to know that they sucked once upon a time. Also, I don’t want them to think that I thought that even though I did). This album is now on my iPod, even though 60% of the songs have a play listing of zero.

There’s also a bunch of songs I found on there from a years-old attempt to make a 90s mix for my friend Amanda (did I ever finish that, Manders?). I’ve got I Mother Earth, Glueleg, Sandbox, Tea Party ( Edges of Twilight and Transmission era, a-thank you very much), Smashing Pumpkins (no Zeitgeist) Moist, Fun Lovin’ Criminals, and so forth. It's actually quite fun to listen to all of this stuff next to the new music I've been listening to and see how my tastes have progressed and how music itself has progressed, but I won't lie: it's kind of depressing that my iPod spans 20 years. Anyone's go longer?

So now I think I have to do a music-buying moratorium. If I have roughly 20 songs on my iPod that haven’t been heard in years, I should weed those out before I get onto anything new.