The decade of the 2000s has witnessed the rise of the iPod, a well-marketed mp3 player whose massive storage capacity and ever-shrinking size has extended the boundaries of personal music players to previously unthinkable proportions. And as digital music has expanded its own boundaries, it has spilled over several others, allowing us the opportunity to reconsider many of our musical assumptions.

Specifically, I examine the iPod in relation to production and marketing techniques, human-technological hybridity, music hermeneutics, genre distinctions, male music collecting stereotypes, and the urban experience in New York City. The major assumption from which this work proceeds is that the iPod’s relationship to culture is dynamic; the iPod doesn’t wholly shape culture, nor is it wholly shaped by culture. Rather, each influences and alters the other, as culture and product evolve alongside one another.

The primary theme that runs through this study is the listener’s relationship to a listening device. How does a music medium affect the way we hear music, and how do our listening habits dictate the functions of an mp3 player? By keeping these questions in the foreground, I privilege contemporary listening habits in order to best understand not only the iPod, but also broader popular music culture in the early twenty-first century.