The Illiterate

Tim Quirk’s wonderful EMP presentation on personal listening devices from the Walkman to the present (Masaru Ibuka was the Sony exec who started the ball rolling) is now available on the Rhapsody blog. It’s somewhat self-serving, personal listening being Rhapsody’s bread and butter, after all, but Quirk is too honest, and too cynical, to do nothing but toot his company’s horn. The clincher for me is the graph showing how broad many people’s personal listening habits are, and how little service they get from radio, or even a lot of the streaming recommendation services (including Rhapsody). If someone could come up with an algorithm to fill that niche, they’d take over radio and the internet in a matter of months. My instinct tells me, though, that not only is such a a thing not possible, but it’s better for all of us that it isn’t.