While its smaller incarnations, the iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano, live on, the company that moved the music industry to digital has finally sent the signal: it's long been over for the MP3, and now it's time to move on. This past Tuesday, Apple pulled the plug on the standalone MP3 player after a 13-year run.

That something was the iPod, first released on October 12, 2001. It was the Napster age, but even then the ability to realign it all with the touch of technology made it it feel like something big was around the corner. I asked my parents for CDs that were blank and faceless, to fill with downloaded music from my older brother's Mac. Yet by the age of 11, I'd already seen the future. I listened to it on the bus on a Sony Walkman. I received my first tape cassette, Green Day's 'Insomniac,' when I was seven. An even louder death knell for our MP3s? Software like Spotify is grander and cheaper than anything in our wildest imaginings.īut we were the download generation, the denizens of the Wild West of modern-music culture, where anything and everything you desired could be yours - not just to listen to, but also to be shaped by. After all, the streaming apps are still better than stealing music. We knew subscription services were likely the future, even if they utilized somewhat arcane pay scales and were rejected by some musicians, like Radiohead's Thom Yorke (who coincidentally helped orchestrate the beginning of the end of the download era when 2007's 'In Rainbows' was released on a pay-what-you-want model). How had so many years of collecting, downloading and cataloging been rendered null? How had an extreme moral ambivalence to the wrongness of piracy - a wanton disregard for anything but having all of the music we could fit on our hard drives - been co-opted and sold back to us for a monthly fee? These mobile apps were here to stay, and they would be taking our music libraries away - by making them irrelevant. Whether 'they' represented tech companies or the music industry, storage constraints on smartphones and the burden of iTunes upkeep was a huge time suck.

That was the half-kidding, semiserious conclusion my college friends and I reached a few years ago when we realized subscription streaming services, namely Spotify, were not a fad.

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