Looking for the dankest iPod knockoffs of the mid-2000s

In a land of vinyl sickos, Spotify normies, and Winamp elitists, Wade Nixon, the person behind the extremely fashionable 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 most likely would’ve been utterly misplaced to historical past if Nixon hadn’t snagged them off of eBay as a part of his quest to resuscitate the numerous baffling misfires of the transportable music increase.

Twenty years in the past, throughout that temporary 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 coated 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 manner.

“I used to be a child throughout these instances. I used to be born in 1990. These manky MP3 gamers had been what I had,” says a usually cheerful Nixon, early within the morning from his house in South Australia. “I’m nostalgic for them, however they’re items of junk. No one purchased them. And I do know that as a result of I’ve had no drawback discovering brand-new copies of them.”

A fascination with previous, unhealthy MP3 gamers definitely doesn’t sound like the inspiration for a massively fashionable internet sequence. And but, DankPods has cultivated 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube and picked up a powerful 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 whole skilled life round music; he was a drummer by commerce earlier than his social media success and studied one thing known as “Jazz Philosophy” in faculty. He says an expertise with an extraordinarily costly pair of headphones at college made him a lifelong audiophile. In its earliest period, DankPods principally showcased Nixon’s iPod modding abilities. In Could 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.

Today, 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 way in which 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 purpose! What had been they considering!) Nixon tells me that he’s under no circumstances afraid of working out of fabric and that there are actually a whole lot of shoddy MP3 gamers left for him to seek out within the benthic areas of the secondhand market.

“The way in which you discover the actually bizarre stuff is by looking out simply the phrase ‘MP3’ globally and scroll by way of the 30,000 outcomes on eBay. Actually, I simply sit on the sofa and simply scroll,” says Nixon, who mentions that this was the tactic he used to discover a Bible MP3 participant that was the topic of a latest video. “When you get previous all these outcomes, you begin misspelling issues. If I’m in search of a drum cymbal, I would kind in ‘drum image.’ That’s while you discover individuals who do not know what they’ve.”

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 previous, 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 manner, is consecrating the MP3 participant in the identical manner that we’ve consecrated the equally outmoded turntable. In truth, once 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 completely different period.

“The web can nonetheless be unreliable, even in an age the place I can get a 5G hotspot out of my cellphone. However there are nonetheless these moments the place it doesn’t work. [With an MP3 player,] it’s yours. You’re holding it,” he says. “I nonetheless use a black-and-white iPod to today. It by no means stopped being good.”

Older of us 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 data past all recognition, and now the thought of importing a handful of MP3s into a tough drive possesses a form 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 definitely has the subscriber rely to point out for it.

In fact, like each creator on YouTube who’s change into enormously fashionable 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 palms 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 movie star in 2022 is to be always prepared to choose up store and transfer to greener pastures if the apps go bitter, and Nixon is not any exception.

“I do really feel safe as a result of the persons are there for me. Even when I used to be demonetized for months, I might hold going. I’ve saved all my movies, so I might go to Vimeo. I’ve all types of contingency plans in thoughts if I needed to go away YouTube or Patreon,” he says. “I’ve bought parachutes on prime of parachutes to drag. I’m right here to remain.”

One of many stunning issues about DankPods is the way in which 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 previous MP3 participant, I’m typically 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 eternally.