In an interview with the Wall Street Journal about his record label and book imprint, Ecstatic Peace, Thurston Moore shared his thoughts on the iPod.
We deal so much with digital media because it has become the breadwinner but I draw a blank when it comes to it. Nothing enthuses me less. I hate iPods. I use my iPhone as an iPod because I can but I hate the way it sounds. The computer manically compresses sounds.
This is debatable, of course. First of all, computers don’t compress anything—people do. And some people compress things far more than others. Second, it could be argued that the shitty headphones most people use to listen to music have had a much worse effect on the quality of the experience than any MP3 file ever has, regardless of compression levels. Third, Moore released a book called Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, about the beauty of a format that’s known to allow sound quality to degrade faster than any other before or after it.
And I understand where he’s coming from, I do. I’m very much from the mix-tape era, and I remember it fondly, to the point where I have probably been guilty of fetishizing it myself from time to time. But we would all be much better off if we could stop trying to justify any position that boils down to “I’ve always done it this one way, so I don’t want to start doing it this other way” by any means other than saying, simply, “I’ve always done it this one way, so I don’t want to start doing it this other way.” (via Daily Swarm)