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In a land of vinyl sickos, Spotify normies, and Winamp elitists, Wade Nixon, the person behind the extremely in style YouTube channel “DankPods,” stands alone with a pair of MP3-playing Oakley sun shades. They had been manufactured in 2004 on the scorching zenith of the iPod craze, and so they in all probability would’ve been fully misplaced to historical past if Nixon hadn’t snagged them off of eBay as a part of his quest to resuscitate the various baffling misfires of the transportable music growth.
Twenty years in the past, throughout that transient pocket of air between the downfall of CDs and the revolution of the cloud, it appeared like everybody, even Oakley, was chasing the elusive cool bequeathed to the iPod silhouettes. The sun shades are simply the tip of the iceberg; DankPods has lined a Batarang MP3 participant, an iCarly MP3 participant, and a Nerf MP3 participant — all of that are chintzy, glitchy, and had been mostly present in historic Kmart checkout aisles. No MP3 participant managed to dethrone the iPod, however Nixon believes the legacy of those failed experiments is price preserving. And, towards all odds, tens of millions of DankPods viewers really feel the identical method.
“I was a kid during these times. I was born in 1990. These manky MP3 players were what I had,” says a usually cheerful Nixon, early within the morning from his house in South Australia. “I’m nostalgic for them, but they’re pieces of junk. Nobody bought them. And I know that because I’ve had no problem finding brand-new copies of them.”
A fascination with outdated, unhealthy MP3 gamers actually doesn’t sound like the inspiration for a vastly in style net collection. And but, DankPods has cultivated 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube and picked up a formidable viewers of greater than 37,000 patrons on Patreon who provide him with round $40,000 a month. DankPods is presently the fourth hottest operation on Patreon amongst accounts that publicly disclose their patron totals, with extra backers than the podcasting juggernaut Chapo Lure Home.
Nixon has spent his complete skilled life round music; he was a drummer by commerce earlier than his social media success and studied one thing referred to as “Jazz Philosophy” in faculty. He says an expertise with an extraordinarily costly pair of headphones in school made him a lifelong audiophile. In its earliest period, DankPods largely showcased Nixon’s iPod modding abilities. In Might 2020, he stuffed a mind-boggling 2,000 gigs into an iPod Traditional. The video was devoured up by the algorithmuh8, and his life hasn’t been the identical since.
Lately, DankPods is primarily centered round Nixon’s deep dives into no matter piece of outmoded digital-audio garbage is presently capturing his creativeness. He’s a pure performer: humorous and breezy in the best way that YouTubers typically are with sufficient technical fluency to roast the UI horrors of, say, an MTV-branded MP3 participant. (It has a tiny microphone constructed into it for some cause! What had been they pondering!) Nixon tells me that he’s in no way afraid of operating out of fabric and that there are actually a whole bunch of shoddy MP3 gamers left for him to search out within the benthic areas of the secondhand market.
“The way you find the really weird stuff is by searching just the word ‘MP3’ globally and scroll through the 30,000 results on eBay. Honestly, I just sit on the couch and just scroll,” says Nixon, who mentions that this was the strategy he used to discover a Bible MP3 participant that was the topic of a latest video. “Once you get past all those results, you start misspelling things. If I’m looking for a drum cymbal, I might type in ‘drum symbol.’ That’s when you find people who have no idea what they have.”
Nixon’s diligence has paid off. It’s genuinely staggering to see simply how deep the MP3 rabbit gap goes, however I feel the ascendancy of DankPods hints at a extra glacial generational shift. At 31 years outdated, Nixon grew up solely listening to music digitally, and millennials are presently greedy authority over what our tradition is allowed to be wistful about. Maybe DankPods, in its personal cockeyed method, is consecrating the MP3 participant in the identical method that we’ve consecrated the equally outmoded turntable. Actually, after I requested Nixon about his love of the format, he sounded a bit like a boomer extolling the virtues of analog heat — recast in a completely totally different period.
“The internet can still be unreliable, even in an age where I can get a 5G hotspot out of my phone. But there are still these moments where it doesn’t work. [With an MP3 player,] it’s yours. You’re holding it,” he says. “I still use a black-and-white iPod to this day. It never stopped being good.”
Older people used to foster the identical complaints about digital music — how can anybody declare to personal a set that doesn’t take up bodily house? However streaming managed to summary our relationship with our favourite information past all recognition, and now the thought of importing a handful of MP3s into a tough drive possesses a type of antiquated, connoisseur-ish mirth that by no means existed again when everybody had an iPod. (All of this nostalgia hit an apogee final month when Apple introduced they had been formally halting iPod manufacturing, prompting Nixon to carry a candlelight vigil.) DankPods is likely to be on the forefront of a dawning MP3 renaissance that hasn’t been totally articulated but. He actually has the subscriber rely to indicate for it.
In fact, like each creator on YouTube who’s turn out to be enormously in style in a brief period of time, Nixon is cautious about how the majority of his funds is tied up with the almighty platforms. YouTube is notoriously defective in its content material moderation, and Nixon tells me that his second channel, Rubbish Time, was flagged after he performed drums to the Wii Sports activities theme. That’s one of many many causes Nixon refined a large Patreon following, the place he arms out further movies to his boosters for a greenback a month. However he additionally finds a few of Patreon’s tech to be finicky and unreliable. To be an web superstar in 2022 is to be continually prepared to select up store and transfer to greener pastures if the apps go bitter, and Nixon isn’t any exception.
“I do feel secure because the people are there for me. Even if I was demonetized for months, I could keep going. I’ve saved all my videos, so I could go to Vimeo. I have all sorts of contingency plans in mind if I had to leave YouTube or Patreon,” he says. “I’ve got parachutes on top of parachutes to pull. I’m here to stay.”
One of many lovely issues about DankPods is the best way the present harkens again to a pre-algorithmic age, when our listening habits had been dictated purely by no matter we might afford on iTunes or crib off of Napster. When Nixon fires up a rickety outdated MP3 participant, I’m usually amazed at how the recordsdata are nonetheless intact. Sure, you actually can go take heed to the Converge albums left to molder on these Oakley sun shades for who is aware of how lengthy. MP3s are stubbornly immortal at a time when the remainder of our on-line expertise feels more and more transient, and I feel Nixon has adopted the identical posture. DankPods will survive for so long as questionable transportable music gamers survive. Proper now, that’s wanting like without end.
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