Editor's Note

A couple weeks ago, I was involved in a semi-serious car accident and my less-than-trusty Honda Civic was deemed, in claims adjustor parlance, a “total loss.” Wrecks like this can be traumatic events for the people involved, but not so in my case: I wasn’t injured, the collision was the other driver’s fault and I didn’t have any sort of emotional attachment to my totaled vehicle. I was in a rental car the next day and bought a new car two weeks later: case closed, for all practical, transportation-related purposes.

One thing I did lose, at least in the rental car-bound interim, was the use of an auxiliary input jack. On a list of the best innovations in the history of car radios, aux-in jacks rate pretty highly—with a $5 cord, you can play your iPod (or Zune, but, really?) through your car stereo without any of the static or channel-shifting you experience with an FM transmitter. Aux-in jacks became increasingly common in cars made after 2007, and had removed, for me, any reason to ever bother with radio stations. Why bother, when I could choose from the entirety of my own carefully curated music collection instead?

I was wrong about that, and in retrospect, I think I have a vague idea why. My rental car was a black Chrysler 300C, and if you’re familiar with the model, you can imagine the non-sequitur of this car, with Sirius/XM’s Shade 45 hip-hop station on blast, piloted by a white kid wearing neon faux-Wayfarers. That’s what I did for the last two weeks, and I enjoyed listening to music in a car more than any time in recent memory. There’s a certain joy to hearing someone else, anyone else, putting on a song that you would have picked yourself. Maybe it’s the surprise; maybe it’s a feeling of community with anyone else listening to the same station. Maybe it’s simply that a song you like, any song you like, stands out relative to most of what’s played on the radio: by contrast, my own iPod spits out a hit parade so relentlessly that the serotonin rush of hearing a favorite song is dulled by hearing all of those songs, in a row, on repeat.

Most likely, it’s some combination of the three. But my time with the 300C, which has sadly come to an end, was a reminder of the importance of context in hearing music. An economist looks at the advent of iTunes, and Spotify and Hulkshare and tastemaking music blogs with endless streams of mp3s, and see enormous utility gains: look at all this music you have access to now, he would say, compared to the very recent past. And the very fact that you listen to so much of it shows how much better off you are thanks to these innovations; otherwise, you’d still find new music on the radio.

This is where what’s called “revealed preference theory” breaks down. The economist in the paragraph above is correct, in some respects, and no one longs for the days when music spread via record stores and FM frequencies. And, admittedly, Sirius/XM is not the same as FM radio, though mostly because Eminem has some sort of corporate tie-in with the former. But there’s something pernicious about all this choice—it allows us to listen to whatever we want in any context. And in so doing, it makes what we want less worth wanting. Would my favorite track in the Shade 45 rotation, “N****s in Paris,” rattle the trunk nearly as hard via iPod playlist? The answer, I’ve found, is no.