Which classic song was on 40% of British iPods?
The iPod was perhaps the last soldier to fall in the fight for physically portable music players, before streaming took over for good. Rest in peace, old friend.
Let’s not deny, even though we remember their many benefits with a rose tint, the iPod was also just a bit of a pain in the arse compared to the convenience of the music libraries we have at our disposal now. The earliest iPods had none of your electronic screens or touch controls – if you wanted one specific song, you had to memorise your playlist and skip through until you found it. It was a bit of a nightmare.
But nevertheless, there was still quite a romantic sense with an iPod that you could be sharing the same song with thousands upon thousands of people at the same time, without ever knowing it. That’s all stripped away by streaming, with constant data and statistics firmly killing any sense of allure. Yet with retrospective analysis revealing that, at one point in time, a certain song was on no less than 40% of iPods in Britain, it risks blowing any kind of fanciful streaming facts out the water.
The tune in question was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen, still boggling the mind with its rock operatic wrath just as much as the day it first blasted through the airwaves in 1975. It stands testament to this that in 2011, research conducted by the car manufacturer Seat revealed the song as most likely to appear on iPods in the UK, as it appeared on over 40% of the country’s devices. To put it another way, just under half of the entire British public had ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as part of their regular playlist routines – there’s no wonder that some of us border on insanity.
Why was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ so popular on the iPod?
A major part of the reason that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ became one of the most popular songs on the iPod was simply due to the sheer greatness of the track itself. This is a song described as “a fulfilment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music” by Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, and “one of the greatest records ever made” by Greg Lake, whose song ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ was kept from number one because of it. Through its juxtaposition from heart-wrenching ballad to head-banging thrasher, it remains the axis on which musical experimentation spins.
But to account for the iPod, a huge factor in the appeal of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is the novelty of it. It’s the exact reason it’s been parodied so many times, and become a pedestal for loving mockery, because it’s so unbelievable. Yet, in this same sense, there’s also something quite funny in listening to such a mammoth song so casually, with your headphones in while walking down the street or doing the dishes. This was a song intended to fill stadiums, but it’s also quite novel to rock out in the comfort of our own homes.
This is why, despite its almost three billion streams on Spotify, nothing can match that same shared feeling of hearing the beginning of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ start up through your shitty string earphones, as you repeatedly click the volume button on the iPod up to its maximum tinny strength. The medium may have died, but the spirit of the song will forever live on.
