208 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age cameras. We can easily carry such devices into all situations, which allow us to enjoy musical audioscapes as the background to our multi- tasking mobile lives. We can then say that MP3 players are truly becoming ubiquitous. While digitalization has allowed superior portability, it has also vir- tualized the actual sound objects. Instead of visible grooves on vinyl, the sound resides somewhere in the abstract bit space. The most pro- found change has happened in the way we purchase music. Since iTunes opened in 2003, millions of buyers have chosen to buy down- loadable music over networks, instead of CDs from music stores. More than a billion songs have been sold so far. 3 Users of networked music services, such as Pandora, do not even know where the music originates from. While this is only an issue to some die-hard artefact lovers, it nevertheless has rendered our music collections virtual, unreal, and intangible. This means that music man- agement is now prone to the same problems that have plagued fi le management in other domains, such as corporate document bases, in the past. Owners of large digital music collections need good data management tools to organize their collections – or to even have an idea of what they actually possess. Besides management, the notion of ownership of digital music is changing. MP3 songs are just like any other fi les, easily copied and easily sent. We may copy 10 000 songs from our friends with just a couple of mouse clicks. This was not as easy with physical media. We may then consider digital music fi les as a commodity, not as copy- righted objects. Obviously copy protection changes the situation, but it remains to be seen whether really effective schemes for content protection can be deployed. It is ultimately the post-modern user type we are discussing here, that is, people that are not at all interested in ownership. People tend to give relaxed interpretations of the ownership of a music object. They may consider as “personal” fi les that they have downloaded from a fi le sharing network, or ripped from a borrowed CD. No matter how the actual ownership of music is defi ned, people still form personal relations with the objects. For instance, my favourite tune playing on a radio channel is “mine” in the sense that I consider it important to me – even if I do not own the object. Our notion of personal content includes “metacontent”, which talks about other pieces of content. For instance, playlists, song ratings, and artist recommendations all serve as qualifi cations of music objects. 3 http://www.pandora.com/