Every now and then, I think about the fact that Karl Lagerfeld owned over 300 iPods. I remember looking at the Sotheby’s website when they went up for auction.
Lagerfeld famously had an “iPod nanny” to digitise his collection for the iPods and to add new music to new devices. This is how he ended up with over 300 of them – he treated them like cassette tapes.
(He also had twenty iPads, which he treated like sketchbooks and diaries, and four iPhones. But did not use email and wrote letters on paper to the end.)
Aside from the obvious crazy-rich fantasy of owning 300+ music devices and employing a full-time curator for them – which doesn’t have a complete appeal for me, because I like to discover stuff myself, I’ve been an online version of a crate-digger for decades — there is something fascinating in this for me.
This is all I have:
And, of course, walls and stacks of CDs.
I bought this phone this year, and it already has 40 GB of audio on it. I don’t think that fills a final generation iPod? 10GB of that cycles around, because it’s my podcast app, Downcast. (The ZEN folder is my meditation apps.) Less than 4GB of that is Bandcamp, oddly – I keep forgetting that I can download purchases directly into the app. I usually download them to the laptop and put them in external storage, as I tend to do most of my listening at the desk. MP3s and CDs and streaming whatever I’ve subscribed to on BBC Sounds.
When, as I often do, I feel like I’m not doing enough, I think about this: Karl Lagerfeld had 300 iPods, lots of them loaded with new music. This job only works if you’re drinking enough new art to feed the gut bacteria.