The last person without an iPod speaks.

A friend was telling me today just how cool his iPod is. Whever he hears a song he can't live without, he runs out and downloads it to his iPod. Capturing it, like a butterfly in a jar.

I know that I am the last person in the world NOT to own an iPod, but so far, this fact hasn't bothered me much. I'm old enough now to have purchased certain musical treasures several times over: first on LP, then on 8-track, then on cassette, then again on cassette when the cassette wore out, then on CD. Now they want me to ante-up for buying my music piece by piece online, so I can stick it on my iPod. Or, I could spend countless hours "ripping" music from my CD's, like my friend.

iTunes launched with about 400,000 songs, and probably has upwards of more than a million songs on it today (just my guess).

My crystal ball says that in the future, we'll own it all. iTunes, that is. All of it will all reside in a handy dandy TerraPod that will dynamically update its own content. A good start would be to sell iPods pre-programmed, bundled thousands of songs.

Downloading songs to your iPod will be a quaint recollection of an old time inconvenience. "I remember back in the old days," you'll tell your grandchildren, "when we had to buy songs one at a time." Personally, I'm too busy to download and rip music (too busy blogging, that is).

As storage space continues to swell and compression can smash more and more bits into smaller spaces, you'll see this within five years if not sooner. If they won't give me every song, I'm willing to bet it'll be nearly every song that you'll ever want to listen to.

But there's too much content to fuss with. Mr. Jobs, make it easier for me to acquire content, and the last person who doesn't own an iPod may just have to relent.