Gone are the days when listening to your favorite album meant popping in a compact disk and relaxing through a 45-minute audio concert. Amid the vast technological accomplishments, many believe the musical listening experience has actually become somewhat more difficult.

The iPod Classic was a resounding hit when the first generation model was introduced in 2001. It allowed for music devotees to download 1,000 songs to have at their disposal and on-the-go for any given occasion. This invention came at a time when the music listener’s experience was being changed dramatically. The entrance into the new millenium brought many different forms of audio listening.

Compact disks and Walkmens were quickly becoming a thing of the past, and Steve Jobs saw an in, successfully captivating the market with his new stream of iPods. The devices came with a stream of updates every so often, geared towards keeping the gadgets up to speed and in working condition.

It comes as no surprise that there has been an upset in people over the discontinuation of the iPod Classic. The decision to kill off the front runner had been years in the making. The last model update came out in 2008 and its four-way button pad technology was phased out in favor of the touch screen.

The upside to this loss is that iPod Classic owners can expect a significant windfall, assuming they do decide to part with their appliances. 160 GB versions of the MP3 player are currently selling for as much as $1,000 on eBay.

Many music listeners today rely on either their phone or music apps like Spotify and Pandora that provide members with free radio stations and access to various playlists. For a monthly fee, Spotify users can have any song or album available to them right at their finger tips. This can be exciting if one does not have an affinity for purchasing physical copies of music.

However, apps like Spotify and Pandora come with their own baggage. Typically, users tend to stream these sites from their phones. While smartphones have proven to be more than adequate in several different ways, one must remember that at the end of the day-they are still phones.

Listening to favorite music has now become a highly interruptable activity. Instead of a consistent run through of a playlist or an album, one must deal with incoming calls, texts, emails or other notifications that pop up regularly on a smartphone. Of course, there are silence buttons, but notifications still have to be checked and responded to.

There is also the issue of storage space. A smartphone is also home for pictures, videos, movies, contacts, etc. That being said, by the time it comes to downloading music, there is little to no room left to even do so. These issues do not even include the fact that iTunes is steadily becoming less and less user friendly.

There has been a resurgence of old school forms of music listening in recent years. Especially with the young adults, we see that records/record players and cassette tapes have made a significant comeback. This desire to be less fettered musically is enough proof that many would just like to return to the days of a simple and unobstructed audio listening experience.