Categories: Articles

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.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.