IkoStar

It came like a solid blow to the solar-plexus… followed by the inevitable progress of despair: denial, anger, depression, bargaining… I went down to the sea and stared disconsolately at the waves as the sky darkened above me….

… and eventually (with a heart like cement) I came to accept that my iPod was no longer the best one available.

Arse. That’s it, I’m defiantly going to commit suicide.

Or maybe buy another one. I haven’t actually filled up the old one yet though fuckit. How am I supposed to keep up?

So I did the numbers. According to Moore’s Law, the capacity of these things doubles every two years, and accepting the KLF’s definition of the ideal pop-song being 3 minutes, 20 seconds long, you get this table:

Which gives the following chart, using Google’s really rather good new chart-making thing.

Growing iPod capacity by number of years it takes to listen to a whole one

So somewhere in the mid-to-early 2020’s you’ll be able to get an iPod with more music than you can listen to in your entire life. And it will all be shite.

In fact the singularity will actually hit in about 7 years… which is when the capacity is increasing so fast you won’t ever catch up… ie: if you started listening in 2014, by the time you get to the end, another one with double the capacity will have come out, and you’ll have to start again without having any time off at all.

Imagine that…. wading thru Color Me Badd at four in the afternoon on your 45th birthday (as evening’s shadows lengthen) knowing that you’re not even 1/2 way and you’ve got another 55 years of Freddy and The Dreamers and that one with that fucking singing frog and so on. Ravell’s Bolero at 4am on your 60th Birthday. Bom nernernerner nernernerner nernernerner ner. Bom nernernerner nernernerner nernernerner ner… all the while thinking about what might have been. Bom nernernerner nernernerner nernernerner ner. Bom nernernerner nernernerner nernernerner ner. On and on.

You’ll go mad, so this is what I suggest you do:

Get a whole load of iPods (a couple for each ear) and listen to them all at the same time, played at about 5 times the normal speed.

You’ll still go insane, but more quickly and in a more interesting way.

So that’s my advice.

ps:

If you started listening in 2026 with your new 100 year iPod, by the time you got to the end, the latest iPod to come out will hold:
628,077,138,145,804,000,000,000,000 years worth. Six hundred and twenty eight million, billion, billion years of the shitest music anyone’s ever heard.

Face it, you’re fucked. You might as well give up now.