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

Wade Nixon, the man behind the popular YouTube channel "Dank Pods," is alone with a pair of sunglasses. If Nixon hadn't taken them off of eBay as part of his effort to resuscitate the portable music boom, they would've been lost to history.

It was twenty years ago that it seemed like everyone was chasing the cool that came from the iPod silhouettes. In addition to the sunglasses, there is a Batarang mp3 player, an iCarly mp3 player, and a Nerf mp3 player, all of which are chintzy, glitchy, and were found in ancient Kmart checkout. Nixon thinks that the legacy of failed experiments is worth preserving. Millions of viewers of Dank Pods feel the same.

I was a child during these times. I was born 25 years ago. Early in the morning from his home in South Australia, Nixon said, "These manky mp3 players were what I had" They are pieces of junk. They weren't bought by anyone. I have had no problems finding new copies of them.

A fascination with old, bad mp3 players doesn't make sense for a web series. An impressive audience of more than 37,000 patrons on Patreon give him $40,000 a month, as well as 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube. Among accounts that publicly disclose their patron totals, Dank Pods is the fourth most popular, with more backers than the podcasting powerhouse.

Nixon studied jazz philosophy in college and was a drummer before he became a social media star. He says an experience with expensive headphones made him a lifelong enthusiast. Nixon's iPod mod skills were showcased in the early days of Dank Pods. He put 2,000 gig into an ipod classic. His life hasn't been the same since he watched the video.

Nixon's deep dives into whatever piece of obsolete digital-audio rubbish is currently capturing his imagination is the main focus of Dank Pods. He is a natural performer, because he is funny and easy to laugh at, like an MTV- branded mp3 player. There is a small microphone built into it. What did they think? Nixon told me that he is not afraid of running out of material and that there are hundreds of shoddy mp3 players left for him to find.

You can find the weird stuff by searching for the word 'MP3' globally and scrolling through the 30,000 eBay results. Nixon mentioned that he used to just sit on the couch and scroll, which was the method he used to find a bible mp3 player. When you get past all those results, you begin to mispronounce. I could type in the drum symbol if I wanted to find a drum cymbal. People who don't know what they have.

Nixon has done a good job. It's amazing to see how deep the MP3 rabbit hole is, but I think the rise of Dank Pods hints at a more gradual shift in generations. Nixon was born at 31 years old and grew up listening to music online. Maybe Dank Pods is consecrating the mp3 player in the same way that we did the turntable? Nixon sounded like a boomer when he talked about his love of the format.

Even in an age where I can get a 5G hotspot out of my phone, the internet can be unreliable. There are some times where it doesn't work. It's yours with an mp3 player. He said you were holding it. I still have a black and white iPod. It didn't stop being great.

How can anyone claim to own a collection that doesn't take up physical space is the same complaint older people used to make about digital music. The idea of uploading a few mp3s to a hard drive has a sort of old fashioned charm that never existed when everyone had an ipod. When Apple announced they were ending iPod manufacturing, Nixon held a candle-lit protest. There is a dawning MP3 renaissance that hasn't been fully articulated. He has a good count of subscribers.

Nixon is wary about how much of his money is tied up with the platforms because he has become so popular. Nixon's second channel, Garbage Time, was flagged after he played drums to the Wii Sports theme, and he told me that his second channel was flagged after he played drums to the Wii Sports theme. Nixon gave out extra videos to his boosters for a dollar a month on his Patreon platform. He also thinks that some of the tech on Patreon is unreliable. To be an internet celebrity in 2022, you have to be prepared to leave if the apps go bad.

The people are there for me and that makes me feel secure. I could keep going even if I was demonetized for a long time. I saved my videos so I could watch them later. He has contingency plans in place if he had to leave. There are parachutes on top of them. I'm here for a reason.

The show is reminiscent of a pre-algorithmic age when our listening habits were dictated by what we could afford on the internet. The files are still intact when Nixon fires up a rickety old mp3 player. It's possible to listen to the albums left to molder on the sunglasses for a while. At a time when the rest of our online experience feels less and less relevant, I think Nixon has adopted the same stance as the rest of us. As long as there are questionable portable music players, there will be Dank Pods. That is looking like it is going to stay that way.