That's something that struck me while watching Baby Driver, director Edgar Wright's new mashup of car chases, heist films and excellent tunes. Its lead character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), is perpetually connected to a pair of headphones, experiencing life as if it's a never-ending music video. But his earbuds aren't attached to a smartphone; they're plugged into one of his many iPods. He has a box full of them, each with their own colors and ornamentations. Basically, a different iPod for every mood.

While they're filled with digital files, the iPods also serve as a physical connection to all of his music. The film opens with Baby in a getaway car, cool as a cucumber while wearing white earbuds, launching into a jam out session with "Bellbottoms" by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. That song also serves as the backdrop for the film's electric opening chase, where you can almost feel the iPod's tiny mechanical hard drive (remember those?) racing alongside him.

As someone who reminisces fondly about my Zune HD, Rio Karma, Toshiba Gigabeat and countless other players of varying quality, Baby's connection to his iPods struck a chord. With older media players, there was a sense of physicality, before cloud syncing made it a cinch to keep track of all your music. If you somehow managed to hit a double whammy of bad luck and lost both your player and your computer's hard drive, you were out of luck.

These days, you can hop between phones within minutes, porting over your entire library without breaking a sweat with iTunes, Google Play and apps like Spotify. You don't even have to wait for your music to download; you can just stream it all from the server heavens.

Baby's iPod addiction seems fitting today, at a time when we're all plugged into headphones most of the day. Just look up from your phone once in a while and you'll see it: a crowd of people, in their own worlds with their own private soundtracks. In Baby Driver, that soundtrack underscores everything, be it a chase, a shootout or even a stroll for coffee. The film also takes pains to choreograph the tunes with what's happening on screen (there's a shootout set to "Tequila" that's pitch-perfect). Baby also uses music as a form of therapy, due to a tinnitus condition that resulted from a childhood car accident. It's a way to drown out the "hum in the drum," as Kevin Spacey's criminal mastermind, Doc, tells us.