My iPod has completely changed the way I listen to music. I love music, but I’ve never been a huge consumer of it. I have a small collection of CDs and I listen to the radio a lot. Before I purchased the iPod, I would pick a CD or two and listen to it/them until I got tired of it and then would listen to another one — CDs would sit in the CD player sometimes for days, weeks.

But now that I have my entire collection on mypod, I often listen to it on shuffle. If I’m running, I listen to one of my playlists with fast, loud music on it, and if I’m in a particular mood, I listen to a particular album, but usually it’s on shuffle. At first I loved it — hearing songs I’d forgotten about or didn’t even know I had. But a few months of that and I was bored with my collection. Sometimes I purposely don’t use the iPod so that I can still be able to listen to it again.

So I’ve begun to consume a lot more music. Used CDs (because new CDs are horrendously expensive) when I’m not sure what I want and need to browse, but mostly using iTunes — where music is often cheaper than buying new CDs and you get it immediately (well, almost immediately — you still have to wait for all of it to download).

But I’ve also been thinking about how tied I am to iTunes. Which, of course, is exactly what Apple wants, right? I can’t create a new playlist without iTunes, I can’t add new music without iTunes. What good is my iPod when I don’t have my mac near me? My mac is no longer my work computer so I don’t have it with me at work on a daily basis so I’ve really begun to notice how useless the iPod is if I want to customize my music without iTunes. I could use it as a harddrive and muck with the files on there, but I can’t play any of the music that’s on there that’s not in my iTunes library without having mypod attached to a computer. Clever, those Apple folks. And selfish, too.