The Beatles & Beethoven - Small Talk

I recently downloaded the entire Beatles catalog on my iPod. As I scrolled through the 200 plus songs, I found myself thinking this is not the "Holy Grail" of pop music the way I once did.

Technology has marginalized what once was an amazing body of work and condensed it into less than 2 gigs of stuff - at least half of which you could scroll through and never listen to again. Do you really listen to "I want to hold your hand" sung in German? Or do you go right for "Strawberry Fields Forever"?

In the old days of CDs, it was not uncommon to put one of those pretty shiny discs in the player and let it play all the way through. And of course in the days before compact discs, you put on an LP and it was too much a pain in the ass to move the needle to the next song, so you would listen to at least half the album in it's entirety.

Isn't it funny that the more convenient and small our music vehicles become, the more likely we are to treat them as less a body of work, and more little snippets of instant gratification? I don't know if that is such a bad thing. Should I suggest that all those times we listened to "Yellow Submarine" we were wasting our time?

It's the same with classical music. All of the sudden the massive canon of Beethoven piano sonatas is condensed to a space no more than the Beatles - also less than 2 gigs on my 80 gig iPod. And what is dangerous about that is I am inclined to listen to parts of sonatas, rather than the entire work. Is that good or bad? I don't know. I guess I know what I like, and I like to listen to what I want when I want it. But am I missing the point? The struggle between listening to the work as it is intended and the convenience of only getting my "fix" from the "good parts" is a difficult one.

I am excited and nervous about the terabyte iPods that will eventually bless us with their ability to have any and every piece of music ever conceived at our fingertips. But perhaps having even 80 gigs worth in one place is my problem: too many choices in such a small, convenient package. I now listen to music the way I watch TV - flipping and scrolling, taking in many shows in bits. Which may be very appropriate given how this music is ultimately delivered to me.