For about a year now, the hottest toy for music lovers has been Apple’s version of an MP3 player, the iPod. The device is similar to other MP3 players; it stores and plays back music files downloaded from a computer, functioning sort of like a high-tech Walkman, but with no cassettes to fumble over. Even the lowest-powered iPod can store around 1,000 tracks, while pricier models store two to four times that amount. All models feature touch-controls that allow the user to find recordings quickly, searching by artist, album or customized “playlist.” And all models sport a rechargeable 10-hour battery, which means that a powered-up iPod effectively plays all day, making it ideal for road trips or long hikes.

Now that Apple has developed a PC-compatible iPod, the gadget threatens to become one of those pieces of technology that changes the way music is consumed, just as the hi-fi, the Walkman and the CD player have done in the past. The rise of high-fidelity home stereos and long-playing 33 1/3 rpm records in the 1950s facilitated pop music’s development as an album-oriented art form. Thirty years later, the introduction of the miniature personal tape player briefly made cassettes the dominant medium for music distribution, until CDs emerged a few years after that.

The compact disc’s digital foundation and its capacity to hold more information transformed the music industry in three ways. As record labels overcharged for CDs and convinced consumers to rebuy all of their favorite old albums, the new technology created an artificial bubble of profits that just recently burst. At the same time, the digital delivery system encouraged the industry to convert to digital recording, which arguably led to a loss of sonic warmth. On the artistic front, musicians grappled with the option of putting up to 78 minutes of music on one easily navigable disc, and many soon abandoned the idea of recording tight, cohesive albums, preferring to load up on half-considered ephemera.

MP3 players have been growing in popularity for a couple of years now, and in combination with CD burners and Web services like Napster and KaZaA, they’ve created a generation of tech-heads who already relate to music differently than their parents, or even their older siblings. Pop music has always been a fundamentally disposable medium, but now cyber-savvy youth tend to treat recordings with the same carelessness with which they’d treat an e-mail message. Music gets downloaded, played for a few days, and then it either gets cleared off the hard drive or “printed out” on cheap recordable discs (which often wind up lost or destroyed). The consumers of tomorrow are in a hurry to move on.

So what will the effect be if the iPod continues to enchant the common netizen? The effect is already being felt, and the news is better than you’d think. For one thing, the explosion of new rock acts over the past year—the neo-garagers, electro-clashers, new New York undergrounders and second-wave emo kids—owes much of its quick impact to the Internet age. Now buzz can build quickly, and nearly everyone with a computer has the ability to listen to or even download tracks by the band of the hour. Acts are no longer confined to their regional club circuit; rockers in Cincinnati and Akron receive as much national media exposure as scenesters in New York and Detroit. There’s been intriguing, largely unheard music getting press almost every week—although much of the fresh crop, inevitably, gets tossed aside by the restless, wired generation.

Of course, not all of the bands who are getting hyped necessarily deserve the attention. Right now, for instance, many of the hot new groups rely on merely re-creating the music of the past—be it garage rock, post-punk or, lately, techno-pop—which means that there are fewer clear innovators to single out. It’s tough to say whether buying the latest Ladytron album is preferable to just digging up some old Human League records, or whether there’s really anything to the likes of The Liars, Radio 4 or The Black Keys (though if you ask me, the answers are no, no, no, and maybe someday but not yet).

But by the same token, those of us with a good music server, a CD burner and an iPod no longer need to feel obligated to clutter up our music collections with hit-and-miss discs by bands who may one day pull it all together. “Salvaging” is the rockophile trend of the early 21st century: The modern pop follower archives the standout tracks from the latest hot hype on a hard drive (or CDR) and dumps the rest. It’s like what young tech-heads do, only with a little more hoarding and a little less abandonment.

Musicians know this goes on, and so do the record labels. The top agenda of the music industry right now is finding ways to get folks to buy CDs again, either by litigating against illegal pirating, or by offering bonus content (like music videos and special Web links) that only those who purchase CDs can access.

Another way is to make better albums, which also seems to be happening. The running time of CDs has been shrinking of late, down from the bloated hour-and-a-quarter of the past decade to a concise, filler-free hour (or less) that more closely approximates the golden age of the LP. Even rappers—notorious for packing their discs with skits and superfluous guest appearances—are starting to tighten up, perhaps understanding that the more extraneous crap they put on their records, the more likely industrious fans are to find cheap ways to acquire the few gold nuggets.

More and more, ruthlessness has become the order of the day when it comes to collecting music. Since I got my iPod and iTunes server hooked up last summer, I’ve not only been ripping apart new CDs to get at the good bits inside; I’ve also been looking at my old discs with more jaded eyes, wondering if I really need all three Halo Benders discs, or if I can distill them down to one CDR and dispatch the leavings to some used CD vendor. (It turns out I can, and it’s not just The Halo Benders I’ve been “salvaging.”)

The flipside to all this rearranging and, in the end, reselling is that while I’ve been disposing of huge pieces of my old albums, I’ve also been keeping little pieces of new albums that I might not have held onto a year ago. I save more, imagining that some odd good track from an otherwise blah record might be of use someday. And thanks to my iPod’s “playlist” function, I’ve been organizing what I save into subgenres, so that I can listen to a randomized selection of alt-country treasures, or old hits from the ’80s. The iPod makes it easy to make use of what I salvage, which makes it easier to keep salvaging.

The new technology is making plugged-in consumers and artists more aware of the history and variety of popular music, and it’s making us at once more curious and more discerning. I’m listening to more music than ever, and I’m also buying more music than ever, because I keep thinking that with the right collection of tracks, properly streamlined and playlisted, I could tell the whole story of rock ’n’ roll.