Lately I've been listening to my 
portable CD player a lot and I've been 
enjoying the music much more than 
usual.

Last night, it occurred to me what was 
making the experience better: lack of 
choice.

The lack of choice I'm talking about 
isn't related to the variety of music 
available. I have enough CDs to 
satisfy my different musical tastes 
and, of course, you can still buy more 
or burn more. 

The great thing about the portable CD 
player is that there are no choices to 
make _while_I'm_listening_.

Like a lot of you, I presume, I'm one 
of those people who plays around with 
the settings on everything. With 
computer programs I always root around 
in the config files and the menus. My 
phone is customized to the nth degree. 

The same is true of music apps and mp3 
players. The really good ones allow a 
lot of customization: there are 
equalizer settings and sound effects 
with toggles and intensity settings. 
And I'm never sure that I've got it 
exactly right. So I keep adjusting, 
keep doing "A or B" tests, etc., when 
I started out intending to actually 
listen to music.

Well, all of that is not a problem 
with the CD player. It has one tone 
adjustment switch (for extra bass). 
It's always on, because that usually 
sounds best with my particular 
headphones. Or at least that's what I 
tell myself. I don't want to admit 
that I'm a bass-head. I'm too old and 
sophisticated for that, right? Back to 
the main point: once I've made that 
decision I'm done. There's nothing 
else to adjust.

But there's another thing that makes 
listening to CDs a more peaceful and 
immersive experience than listening to 
mp3s (or FLACs, AACs, and those 
ridiculous WMAs left over from the 
days of Zune). 

When I use an mp3 player, I'm always 
searching through the files for the 
next song to listen to. In fact, I'm 
so impatient that when I find it I 
often don't finish listening to the 
song I'm on. I'm never really sure 
that I made the right choice with the 
next song either. I know that may be 
my weird personal psychology, but 
given what I'm going to discuss below, 
I don't think it is.

In any case, when I put on a CD, I 
just listen to the whole thing, and I 
actually focus on the music. It's 
immersive. It's serene. It's a special 
kind of zen.

I accidentally came across a study 
years ago in the Harvard Business 
Review[1] about marketing and choice. 
The author discussed a company that 
was trying to sell jam. When they put 
24 varieties on display, they got a 
lot of attention but made few sales. 
When they reduced the selection to six 
varieties, they started to sell a lot 
more jam.

The author of the article thought that 
people became mentally paralyzed by 
having too much choice and just walked 
away from the decision. When they 
choices were reduced to a mentally 
manageable number, it became a lot 
easier to come to a conclusion. 
Equally interesting, the article noted 
that even when people made a choice 
from among a great number of 
possibilities, they were less likely 
to be satisfied by it.

I don't know for sure if that analysis 
is correct, but it seems tenable to 
me. My CD player has a nice sound, but 
I think in part I'm happiest when 
using it because I have a couple of 
simple choices to make: what to listen 
to and whether to turn that bass 
switch on or off.

On. Always on. 


[1] https://hbr.org/2006/06/more-isnt-always-better