I had the amazing experience of attending the quintessential University house party last weekend.

The party was equipped with common things you’d expect at a college party: beer pong, kegs and music courtesy of one of those popular speaker systems you dock your iPod into. This is one of many parties I attended recently with an iPod playing the role of DJ. What struck me about the iPod DJ was the sheer amount of music on it.

With iPod dock systems becoming a necessary accessory these days, having to move around with a bunch of CD-Rs is something of the past. This got me to thinking about how drastically MP3s have changed how people experience music. When I say MP3, I’m discussing the file format rather than actual player. MP3 files, like CDs, records and radio did in the past, are changing how we experience our music.

The MP3 hasn’t been good for the commercial and industrial interests of the musician, but it has altered the listener’s relationship with their music. MP3s have made everything from how we discover our music to how we listen to it different. They have made most of us private consumers of music and have allowed taste to be more individualistic.

This is primarily due to the immense catalogs of music available on legal and illegal Web sites on the Internet. I remember watching an episode of ‘Entourage’ and hearing a song I had never heard but liked. I got the title of the song during closing credits and downloaded it in a matter of seconds. People’s iPods reflect playlists with everything from Rachm aninov to Jay Z’s ‘The Black Album.’

This has a downside because it also means it feeds people’s need for music given cheaply and quickly. This demand sacrifices quality and drives our use of Illegal peer-to-peer websites. Today a lot of MP3 players are packed with illegally purchased low-quality music.

The MP3’s popularity stems largely from the ease with which a person can purchase music. Ease in this case means the file has to be compressed in order to fit large amounts of music in relatively small storage media like flash drives. This process of compression results in a tradeoff between audio quality and amount of space used. This may seem like a small sacrifice for the convenience of using MP3 files.

This sacrifice is sad because listening to music is capturing an artist performing something magical and unique. Listening to a rendition of a song that doesn’t genuinely capture the essence of the musical performance defeats the purpose of listening to music. The CD has its limitations, but it is as close as one can get to a quality digital rendering of a musician’s performance.

Listening to vinyl records, on the other hand, opened my mind to how music should really sound. Records can sound very crisp and clean, with every subtle element of the recording sounding alive and unrestrained. The subtleties that underline great music tend to enrich how people interpret what they are listening to. It is these subtleties that are sacrificed in the low-quality sounds of MP3 files acquired on many P2P websites. The quality of a recording enriches the experience of listening to music.

The MP3 is further fading out the vinyl album, giving listeners less initiative to enjoy an album as a single work of art. Listeners now pick out favorite songs and skip over songs that don’t interest them. The fact that we prefer songs to albums has further sacrificed the experience of reading liner notes and gazing at album cover art.

The music becomes something easily accessible with the advent of the MP3, but with the ease of access, we lose respect for an artist and his or her craft.

Respecting an artist’s craft is an important part of the artist and audience relationship. This respect for an artist’s creation is manifested in how we choose to treat an artist’s creation. How we treat an artist’s creation will guide whether you get your music from iTunes or Limewire. It will inform our decisions on whether to buy a CD or just download a track for $0.99. These decisions reveal people’s attitudes toward the music they choose to listen to.

If I love an artist, I will make it my duty to buy his album or download all of it from iTunes. An audience must respect an artist’s craft, and can do so by paying for an artist’s performance. Respecting an artist and the integrity of his or her art requires us to obtain quality renditions of the music.

The MP3 has stopped consumers from appreciating and thinking seriously about how they treat the music they love so much. As consumers of art, we hold an artist responsible for the quality of his art. With that in mind, artists also have the right to hold each consumer personally responsible for how we treat their music. Consumers need to be conscious of how they get their music and its quality.

Either way, the MP3 will continue to be a force that will shape listening habits for better or worse.

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