A catalyst for new music
— Kate Walker Fortunately for me, I visited the Apple store in London and used some highly persuasive language (threatening to buy an Iriver and never supporting Apple again.) This resulted in a free replacement even though I was two months out of warranty, and I still have it to this day. Because I had lost all my music, I ended up collecting music from lots of different people I met traveling for the next eight months. I got so much cool stuff I had never heard of that for literally years I was discovering cool music (13th-floor elevators, Death cab for cutie, Broken Social Scene, the list goes on) by picking something random on my iPod.
A soundtrack for Stonehenge
–Richard Watts A month or two later I was in the UK for the first time in my life, and that iPod was my soundtrack for a visit to Stonehenge – somewhere I’d wanted to visit since I was a child. I can still remember my first glimpse of the megaliths as our bus carried us across Salisbury Plain, and the album that was playing on my iPod at the time: Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson’s soundtrack to the film ‘Angels of the Universe. To this day, listening to that album – and in particular the Sigur Rós tracks’ Bíum Bíum Bambaló’ and ‘Death Announcements and Funerals’ which are its closing tracks – bring back vivid memories of that day. I still own that iPod.
How to pick up boys
— Rachel England
Like losing your arm
— Jane Bentley Hours and hours of a life’s work in what used to be called ‘record collecting’ on my cool, chunky iPod. Which didn’t feel that dissimilar to the deceased Walkmans in size… Then I stupidly left it in my car and someone nicked my car from outside the house. Car gone. All the music I’d ever owned, gone. Ever since, I’ve not downloaded or bought music in the same way. A bit of me died that day.
Hide your loser music by using an iPod
— Gina Clarke The pocket device made it easy to hide from my indie friends that I was listening to Eminem. Plus, it was much more easier to carry around than a personal CD player.
Songs to snowboard to
— Toms Panders, CEO, Setupad
A bad iPod dad joke
— Ieva Sipola, Content Marketer, Truesix Then I saw there was already something on it! Only one song, but it had to be a special one since my Dad put it there on my Christmas present. I plugged in the earphones with trembling hands and waited – what’s gonna be that special song, the first one to be ever played by my iPod? And there it was. Farting Christmas Jingle Bells. This is a song I can’t unhear and a memory I can’t forget, which was precisely my Dad’s idea of an unforgettable Christmas present.
Tech journos are mean
— Clare Shephard I still have it!
An iPod DJ Club
– – Jonny Rocket I also briefly part-time edited a magazine based around the IPod.
Wow Apple were really stingy with their PR
— Chevy Davis
Lessons from the former Apple head of UK PR
— David Millar Early on, I remember deciding to go and visit every music magazine I could get in to see and put the first iPod in journalists’ hands. You really couldn’t “get” the interface until you played with it. After a few visits, the most successful pitch became clear: Go outside with anyone that smoked. When a music journalist found they could smoke with one hand and browse their music with the other they were sold. I remember driving the UK’s first Bondi blue iMac to a service station late at night where an evaluation was done plugged into a cleaner’s socket in the cafe. Apologies to all who didn’t get the kit they needed. We were always absurdly under-resourced and the bean counters could not be budged. It was hard work but great times.
