iPod More Popular Than Beer For College Kids

I was just watching the national news on NBC and there was a report on how Tower Records is in the final days of their going-out-of-business sale and the iPod played a huge role in this shift away from buying CDs. The reporter then made a statement about iPod, beer and college students. I thought I heard wrong, so I hit Google News and came across this paragraph from an article in the Los Angeles Times called, The iPod Revolution, from October 22nd, 2006:
“A recent study by the Student Monitor research firm discovered that the most popular activity among college students in 2005 was listening to their iPods (This broke a long winning streak by the previous champion, beer-swigging.)”
OK, so I did not hear it wrong on TV. College students are listening to iPods more than drinking beer. That’s more astonishing than Tower Records going bankrupt because people prefer buying their music online.
The article, The iPod Revolution, has many more great insights into how and why the iPod is changing much more than the way we listen to and buy music.
“Almost buried in the news of Google’s $1.65-billion recent purchase of the YouTube video site was the announcement that several studios and record labels (including Universal, Warner Bros. and CBS) have inked new arrangements with YouTube that not only allow the service to stream their copyright-protected music and videos, but even allow the masses to use that closely protected content in their own uploaded camcorder vignettes. YouTube, whose ‘schedule’ is determined by searching, random browsing or social networking, presents a view of television that is pure a la carte … pure shuffle. It’s a child of the iPod. And so are we.”
You can read the whole article here: Los Angeles Times – The iPod Revolution.