Received a Christmas greeting from fellow jazz broadcaster, music enthusiast and award-winning editor of NetGuide magazine, Nigel Horrocks. I thought his comments about the iPod ‘revolution’ (not entirely sure I like that word – perhaps ‘phenomenon’ is better) deserved a wider audience than simply a quick read in my Gmail inbox, so with his permission, it becomes a guest blog post.

I’ll skip past the greetings and kind words, and get straight to the thoughts on music technology.

The Ipod has completely changed my life in the last year unlike anything else in a lifetime of music listening. I was never a fan of listening to Walkmans etc because I cared about the quality of sound and wanted it to hit me from all sides. But my floor to ceiling room of thousands of vinyl and CDs has literally reached its limit and I was faced with selling some or hiring a warehouse.

I have now transferred 9700 of my favourite tracks to the Ipod . I have it always on “shuffle songs” giving me – as someone put it – the “soundtrack of my life” – the tracks I have most enjoyed or been fascinated by from the age of 5 all carried around in my pocket at all times.. As you put it so well, music listening is about surprise and being challenged (also why I enjoy jazz) and I love wandering around dealing with the often complex music on the Ipod while waiting in queues for mundane tasks like getting a stamp at the Post Shop!

Few of the 9700 tracks will ever appear on any radio station. The real eye opener came after I bought the Itrip FM tramsitter for the Ipod.

It means that in the car I have a new station on 108FM – “my” station provided by the Ipod placed on shuffle It is the radio station I always dreamed of – full of surprise. I have placed the Ipod in the glove compartment so that I never cheat and find out the title of the next track. I go from Mali music to 70s funk to John Coltrane to Scribe between sets of traffic lights. I re-discover stuff I had forgotten about because it had been lying in Cds at the top of the shelves, I get to grips with stuff that had eluded me for years and find tracks I had over-rated over the years! No inane DJ chatter, no long commercial breaks, no static, no depressing news breaks. It has re-connected me to music and rekindled my passion. I have put a few old Hauraki pirate jingles in as it feels as if I am running my old pirate station.

Sorry for the rave but after reading your Podcasting and Itunes rants, I felt I could relate to what was happening in your world. Radio execs seem blissfully unaware of the Podcast and Itrip phenomena but the implications are staggering. In the last month, four friends have been inspired to buy an Ipod and Itrip after hearing my rave and they now listen only to their own station. My next dream would be to be able to swap the actual music on my Ipod with some stranger online who has an interesting selection on his so that we could both use the mechanism to discover some more new music. We may not be far away from this!

Kind regards

nige

Nigel followed up with a postscript to the effect that the iTrip is actually illegal here in the UK.

British spectrum allocation may have its good points (certainly from a nationally-configured public service perspective), but they just have no clue when it comes to the potential for guardband, low power and community broadcasting.