Observations: how many use one? Guys' night out - 24 January 2008

On Thursday night, after I have attended the group's outreach event, Soul Cravings, I decide to tag along with a group of guys from C4C for a guy's night out. Pizza, games, that sort of thing. [1.1] While we are walking to our host's house, I notice that only one of us didn’t have a portable music player of some kind. The person that doesn't was a study group leader, Philip Chow, who speaks rather reservedly about these things. He is a spry man about my height, with black hair in a neat dome cut. [1.2] He is associating MP3 data players with piracy because of the Napster scandal six years ago. He is rather shocked to hear that digital music is now sold over the internet legitimately, and is genuinely interested in checking it out. [1.1] Right now, he uses a player that reads MP3s off of CDs that he burned from his computer for his music mainly. Everyone else has a portable music data player. Half of us (there were ten guys in total) have cellphones. All of them can play music. [1.2] One of the guys remarks with joy about how he uses his cellphone to play music in his car. All of our music players have additional capabilities, whether it is taking calls, displaying photos and video, or taking pictures, or storing data. [Is there even such a thing as a music player that just plays music? The only one I can think of right off-hand is the iPod shuffle] [1.2] [Of interest to people in Canada is this news item in February: SOCAN is reviewing a model where each person pays a flat tariff to the internet service provider in exchange for being able to download any music off of the internet without any repercussions whatsoever. This is sure to cause even more feuding between artists over even more limited monetary resources. I don't really think that this is a good thing...]