I recently purchased a new iPod, one of the 60-gigabyte models that holds up to 15,000 songs as well as displays digital photos on its color screen. I must say, I’m in heaven. Currently I have about 11,500 songs crammed into my new iPod (all legally obtained, I’m sure), which is well over half of my total library of 17,000 mp3s. (That’s around 54 days of music, played continuously with no repeats.) Before I bought the new toy, I imagined the joy of having that much music at my fingertips, of never lacking the perfect song to complement the moment, to provide that ultimate soundtrack to my life. And as is often the case when high expectations meet the market for consumer electronics, I got more than I paid for.
One such unanticipated consequence of the iPod’s voluminous storage capacity is that I frequently spend more time looking through my songs than listening to them. Having that perfect song is no problem when you have 11,500 songs in your pocket, but finding it before the moment is over can be difficult. And it is not that my music is disorganized (believe me, I spend hours correcting ID3 tags) nor is it that I am not used to having an iPod, as the one I just purchased is the second iPod I’ve owned (the first was a paltry 20-gigabyte model … oh the humanity). Rather, I am so overwhelmed by the selection of music, let alone the obligation I feel to actually listen to most of it at some point, that I end up listening to the same 100 or so songs over and over again. It is really sad how many times I’ve listened to “Girls on Film” (94) according to the song’s Play Count in iTunes. At 3:30 long, that’s almost 5 and 1/2 hours of the same Duran Duran son, over and over and over again. In fact, my top ten most frequently played mp3s have been played 881 times altogether, a total of almost 540 hours listening to the same ten songs. Given the choice of so many songs, why would I spend so much time hitting the repeat button (other than a profound case of obsessive-compulsive disorder)?
Those of you who paid attention in your college economics course might remember a concept called “transaction costs.” These are the costs of completing a transaction above and beyond the price of the good or service sold. Transaction costs can take many forms; time spent searching for the optimal product (the good or service that will exactly meet the consumer’s need) is one of them. As the number of products from which one can choose increases, so do the transaction costs associated with finding that best product. Frequently these search costs are not insignificant and can consume hours out of a person’s life. As an example, my “research assistant” and I discovered on a recent trip to my local Publix that the store carries 102 types of toothpaste and 238 kinds of deodorant. When you consider that each of those 102 varieties of toothpaste is intended to perform the same basic function (fighting cavities and preventing tooth decay), it becomes a little mystifying why we need so many options to choose from. The same thing is true of deodorant, which is supposed to stop us from sweating and stinking. Will one deodorant, a clear gel with a “cool wave” scent, de-stink us anymore than an unscented roll-on? Am I missing something here?
Over-saturation with choices is inevitable in a society with almost limitless wealth that worships the individual consumer with such evangelical fervor. Profit-maximizing consumer-goods companies find unfilled niches impossible to resist, and as a result grocery store shelves and consumer attention-spans groan under the weight of capitalist avarice and marketing acumen. When faced with so many options in the oral hygiene aisle alone, one has to wonder if “choice” is a commodity that can be over-produced and hence consume resources better spent elsewhere. In other words, would we really be any better off as a society with 103 types of toothpaste, or any worse off with 101? Are we improving the human condition by setting our table thick and deep with selection, or simply burying ourselves under an avalanche of redundant crap?
Ultimately it is not a matter of consumers deciding that enough is enough as much as it is figuring out how to convince the Proctor and Gambles of the world to ease up on the new-and-improved. And considering that over-saturation has as its root the desire to fulfill consumers’ every need, we might just be cooked in our own goose.
If I have any great revelations on how to resolve this conundrum, or if any readers have any suggestions, I’ll run them in a future article. In the meantime, I will continue to seek inspiration from the same ten songs on my over-stuffed iPod. Or I might branch out and listen obsessively to something else. Say, “Planet Earth”?
My Top Ten Songs in iTunes, by Play Count (Play Count is in parenthesis)
1. “Earn Enough for Us”, XTC (142)
2. “Rocks”, Primal Scream (125)
3. “Girls on Film”, Duran Duran (94)
4. “24 Hour Party People”, Happy Mondays (87)
5. “I Can’t Believe”, Apples in Stereo (83)
6. “Get Set to Fall Out”, Radio 4 (83)
7. “Ballroom Blitz”, Sweet (72)
8. “Deceptacon”, Le Tigre (67)
9. “Around the World”, Daft Punk (66)
10. “Now It’s On”, Grandaddy (66)