To Know Me, Know My IPod
  By JOHN SCHWARTZ
  The New York Times
  November 28, 2004
  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/weekinreview/28schw.html

SOMEHOW, I had ended up inside of Ken's head - in Kenworld.

Kenneth Chang is a colleague who recently sold me his iPod. After just
a few months, he needed one with more storage.

The beauty of the thing is that it lets you carry all of your music
with you, thousands of songs. It's like having a radio station that
plays the music of my life: WJHN.

After buying the slightly scuffed block of plastic and metal, I was
ready to load my songs. But then I stopped. Ken had left more than
3,000 songs on the iPod, and a quick scroll through them showed that
there were a lot I didn't own, and many artists I'd never listened to,
like a band called "The The," with a wonderfully brutal song,
"Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)."

And so I listened.

I like to think I present an innocuous, well-socialized face to the
world - nothing for anyone to worry about. But if you know that I like
the Canadian band Moxy Fruvous (raucous, four-part, leftist harmonies)
then you know a little something else about me. You've gotten a new
data point. If you have all of my songs, the points coalesce to form a
picture, an intimate one that doesn't quite match the public persona.

You know that my musical tastes run to the angry, the romantic and the
sad; I'm drawn to smart, word-drunk musicians at odds with the world.
That means Elvis Costello and Steve Earle, but also the New Jersey
rockers Fountains of Wayne; it's the twisted bluegrass of the Austin
Lounge Lizards and the honky-tonk rock lyricism of Ben Folds. It's
music that I can shout along with in the car.

"Electronics have become steadily more intimate," Paul Saffo, research
director of the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, said, and
"your electronic castoffs say a lot more about you than ever before."

Mr. Saffo, for example, said that he sometimes pokes through hard
drives he's junking with a power drill to avoid leaving data that can
lead to so-called identity theft. But music provides something far more
revealing than financial or vocational data: our emotional identity.

"Add to your playlist your ZIP code, and a direct marketer could
probably tell you more about yourself than you know," Mr. Saffo said.

Mary Culnan, a professor of management at Bentley College in Waltham,
Mass., agreed. Professor Culnan, who says her own iPod is full of
bootleg recordings of Bruce Springsteen concerts, has studied the ways
that marketers accumulate data and how they conclude that, say, a
household that receives catalog A and donates money to political cause
B would make a likely customer for the Victoria's Secret catalog.

"If there were some way they could get all your playlists," Professor
Culnan said, "that would be the same as doing marketing based on video
rentals and their book purchases. It's that personal."

As a small example, she suggested that people whose iPods are filled
with opera and people whose iPods are filled with rap would have very
different tastes in jewelry. "The concept of bling-bling is going to be
very different for these groups," she said.

So eavesdropping on Ken's iPod worried me. I have read about people
randomly plugging in to each others' iPods to figure out what songs are
in their friends' heads, or even in the heads of strangers. (They call
it "podjacking.") But this was a mind meld.

What if I hated Ken's taste? Would I lose respect for him? I'm not
talking about the Paula Abdul songs; we're all entitled to our guilty
pleasures. But what if it was all bubblegum, or deeply dull? It would
be like opening his closet and finding Star Trek uniforms. I fretted.

But I fretted wrong. Moments of serendipity thrilled me; I was driving
with my teenage daughter, listening to the iPod through the car stereo,
when the Beatles' "Yesterday" began to play. It's a song that is nearly
dead to me after so many thousands of repetitions. But when it
finished, the machine skipped to a version of the song I had never
heard, by Ray Charles. He sang with all the pain and heart that the
twentysomething Paul McCartney could not have known, and I listened
with tears in my eyes.

And things went like that for a couple of weeks: glorious discoveries,
songs that didn't move me and the occasional geology lecture because
Ken used his iPod as a digital tape recorder. Outside his iPod, Ken is
pleasant but reserved. But his selections show an unbridled feeling I
had never glimpsed: he treasures the passionate Tori Amos, and has a
goofy soft spot for Air Supply. I know him better, and I like what I
know.

There are programs that I could get to take the songs off the iPod and,
say, transfer them to a hard drive in my home. I know high school kids
who have a big hard drive that they pass around, connecting from
computer to computer and adding all of their CD's to it, file-trading
off the Internet and under the radar of the music industry's lawyers.
But I'm no swapper, and I make my living thanks to copyrights.

So I'm getting ready to wipe the drive. I'm making a list of the music
I'll be buying over the next few months. And I am desperate to buy that
five-CD Ray Charles set.

And no, you can't borrow my iPod. It's personal.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company