'Playlist anxiety'

Don't ya love it - an anthopological study of people's feelings about their iPod playlists? That's what researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center did, and - though it was about playlist-sharing at the office - it definitely provides insights into the online music scene in which teens are a huge demographic group. "Public embarrassment may now be the routine lot of the unhappy [teenager] who gets caught with a [music] collection too heavily weighted toward the collective works of [fill in any band or singer that is "uncool" among his/her peer group]," CNET reports. Other findings: people waiting to add tunes to their collections until after they'd checked out what other people were listening to; perceptions of others generally unchanged "except for one or two people who seemed a little too attached to the most current pop hits [in which case the perception would be quite negative]"; and "a sense of loss" when friends' computers went offline because people become attached to peers' music libraries. You begin to see who emerges as alpha male and female of these digital-music social packs!