RIP iPod and the music culture of yesteryear

So, just today I was reading a solid article over on the verge called "The iPod is gone, but not forgotten." I definitely recommend giving it a look, but I really found the following excerpt to be powerful:

" 'Looking at someone’s iPod was like looking into their soul. In their music you could see who they were. You could tell if they were sophisticated or rough. You could see in their playlists the moments they fell in love and the moments they fell back out again.' "

"But now, the iPod is a relic of the past, and everything has changed. The notion of a music collection has been obliterated by the fact that we can stream nearly any song ever recorded and released, for free, instantly. Spotify and its ilk have fundamentally changed the way we interact with music again. In some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse: "

'Soon there will be no such thing as your music library. There will be no such thing as your music. We had it all wrong! Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be a commodity. It wants to be packaged into apps that differ only in terms of interface and pricing models. It wants to be rented. It wants to reveal nothing too personal, because we broadcast it to Facebook and we should probably turn on a private session so our boss doesn't see that we listen to Anaconda on repeat and think we’re high at work.'

"Don't get me wrong. I don't want to go back to syncing my music with iTunes over a USB cable and being annoyed if I forgot to load up the new album I've been loving. It's great to be able to access anything I want, whenever I want. But I can't help but miss the days when I laboriously curated my MP3 collection, taking nearly as much delight in a well-organized collection of MP3s as our parents might have taken with a shelf full of vinyl records."

"I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that."

 It's crazy to think about how much our culture has changed with regards to music just since the launch of iPod. I definitely remember the time when anytime you saw someone with an iPod in school, you had to take a scroll through their music collection, and that's how you decided who they were. That was how we defined ourselves. Music was important.

Right now, Spotify/Rdio/Google Play Music playlists or Pandora/iTunes Radio stations don't hold that same clout that the iPod library did. We post them to Facebook so that everyone can see, but nobody cares to look. Music is just a thing: free and always there, and we all listen to different things. Or the same things. Nobody cares.

Honestly, right now I feel like the streaming service that you use says more about you than anything. Oh, you use Google Play Music All Access or iTunes Radio? You're a fanboy. You use Pandora? Congrats on only listening to crappy top-40 pop. You use Spotify? Wow, I guess my music just isn't cool enough for you. You use Rdio? That makes one of you.

I don't know. I think it all is interesting, especially considering that we're also seeing a resurgence of vinyl in the marketplace. Let me know what you think in the comments.