During the Web 2.0 conference last week there was a panel with teenagers, mostly 17. The transcript is here. Now we must be careful to read too much into this as these are 5 kids from the Bay Area and probably are not representative of an entire generation, but these to me are the highlights:

 

 

A couple of hundred a month on ringtones? Ouch!

 

Q: Who has an iPod?
3 of 5 have ipods .

 

The guy from Nokia at Reboot in Copenhagen would have continued to ask if they kept it in their trouser pockets or in their bags. To see if these were truly treated as mobile devices or not. He said Steve Jobs biggest problem is that iPods are not carried around in peoples pockets like their keys, handkerchiefs and since a couple of years a mobile phone.

 

And while we are discussing iPods and thus music:

Sasha: I have 10 paid songs out of 1500 on my iPod .

 

The most revealing comment in the transcript to me was this one:

 

 

Having CDs, and records or tapes or eighttracks is when I think of it a symptom of an age where information was scarce. Thus it was interesting if not vitally important to have the actual information carrier in your posession. We went to classmates homes to listen to records that we didn't have ourselves. Now in the age of information abundance, it becomes futile to want to posess the actual carrier with data, or have the actual file stored. There would be simply to much to have. It is more important to have a (shifting) collection of pointers to stuff that might be of use or interest combined with the certainty that it will be out there when you want to access it. Are children intuitively moving away from owning information, in this case music? I think I can see something like that in my own behaviour as well. I used to buy a CD to try it out, now I only buy CDs when I already know the music from on-line listening. It's an easy way to get a physical info carrier for the car, the stereo etc. It's certainly no longer the journey of discovery that buying a vinyl album was when I was in my teens, when all you really knew of an album were the single releases and the rumors about those who had the album already.

I guess Keep It Simple Stupid still holds true across the generations.

 

And now a first attempt of including an ad in a blog posting: