MPMan to iPod. Ten Years of Progress.

MP3 players are changing and evolving all the time. I can remember my first MP3 player. The MPMan F10. 32 megabytes of storage. It cost me around 200 Irish pounds back in 1999. It was amazing. No CDs, no cassettes. Nothing. It took me a while to get my head around the concept.

When you think back to the infancy of the MP3 player, it really has come a long long way since the days of the F10. 32 megabytes is a laughable amount of memory. These days my iPod has 32 gigabytes of memory. A thousand times what the F10 had. And it only cost me about €250 ($300). In ten years, the MP3 player has grown from a pretty useless, albeit cool experiment into something which has changed the world. Music is now everywhere. You no longer have to save your hard-earned money for weeks to buy an LP. You can just listen to it online. Traditionalists argue that this spells the demise of the music industry, while others argue that it makes music more accessible. I'm not sure which side to take.

The last ten years have been monumental in shaping the future of how we listen to music. What will become of the MP3 player? Will we need iPods in another ten years? Or will they be a thing of the past, like the Walkman or the Discman? Who knows. Only time will tell.