We’re in the age of the omnipresent Apple iPod. Portable media players such as Apple’s iconic devices allow many people to now have literally thousands of songs at their fingertips everywhere they go. They can enjoy their favorites and experience new music at their whim. But this ability has fundamentally changed how we listen to the music that we purchase.
Way back when, the most popular format for recorded music was the vinyl record. As a typical listener, you’d begin with the first song on the first side and listen until you had to flip the record over, and then listen to that side.
Cassette tapes and 8-track cartridges each had their day in the sun, but ultimately didn’t have the staying power of the vinyl record. Along the way, the Sony Walkman cassette player made people realize that listening to recorded music could be a portable experience.
But with the introduction Compact Disc, the entire experience of listening changed. Most CD players offered the ability to skip certain tracks on the CD, or to randomize the order in which the songs were played. Some multi-disc players even randomized the songs on multiple CDs so that they would play a song on one CD and then play a song on a different CD until all of the songs had been played.
People began to get in the habit of listening to only the songs that they liked, or in a different sequence than that which the artist designed.
Can you imagine how some of the biggest selling and most well-known pop and rock albums, for example, of the last 50 years would be different if the order of the songs were different? Maybe the Rolling Stone’s Tattoo You didn’t begin with Start Me Up, or A Day in the Life wasn’t the last song on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but was the second song? Or “concept albums” such as The Who’s Tommy, that told a story from beginning to end had jumbled the story? And what of Pink Floyd’s masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon, which is really best enjoyed in an uninterrupted session. Would those have the same impact and success if their stories had been different?
It’s All About the Story
I wonder if this change in listening habits, and how we’re all accustomed to the quick track and the “sound bites”, has actually affected how we use software such as Monarch. If you’re thinking that I’ve been listening to a bit too much Floyd, please give me a moment.
More often than not I see that people want to get going and do a quick data capture and export that data to some other document or database, and that’s it. In. Out. Done. Just like listening to few random tracks on an iPod.
Monarch is of course more than able to support such a work style. But you’ll be missing out on its real potential if you don’t listen to the album all the way through. That is, if you don’t use Monarch as the powerful analysis tool that it is.
Do you regularly add calculated fields to your extractions to not just improve the quality of the extraction but to add further abilities with which to analyze the source data and let it tell its story?
Do you add not just one or two filters to build the correct data set, if there were difficulties in the original template traps due to the layout of the report, but many filters to really find the shining stars in the vast universe that is the entire data set?
Do you build multiple summaries with various combinations of key fields to help your data show you what’s really going on? Do you use summaries in order to reveal well hidden information that could be critical to your organization?
The iPod in the Age of Monarch
Yes, it’s a hectic and fast-paced world today. There’s much to do, and seemingly less time to do it in.
Stop the world for a few extra minutes. Listen to the entire album as it was meant to be heard and you’ll excel with Monarch.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Heh… I just finished creating a Monarch Model that reads the itunes XML file.
Now that’s funny. Before or after reading this post?
Just a few minutes and a couple of floating traps and Replace() functions later to clean up the ampersands, and that worked like a charm. Very nice! Thanks for the inspiring comment.
Actually, just prior to reading this. I also found that you can do an Export in iTunes by right-clicking the Music folder (or any playlist). This gives a tab-delimited file which, obviously, Excel can read directly.