Last spring, Connor Gressitt, then a senior at New York University, traveled to Mexico with friends. As they cruised down back roads far from any cellular towers, the notion of accessing Spotify through their iPhones became laughable. Mr. Gressitt’s friends were desperate for some kind of soundtrack for their road trip, and they didn’t know what to do. That is, until Mr. Gressitt pulled out an archaic device.

“‘I brought my iPod,’” Mr. Gressitt said.

A holdout in a generation of music fans who rely on streaming services, Mr. Gressitt had been listening to music on his trusty old iPod since 2007.

“As soon as they saw music on it,” Mr. Gressitt said, “they were like, ‘O.K., sick.’”

As he told the story of the Mexico adventure on a recent evening at his apartment in Brooklyn, the device, an iPod Classic he had received as a Christmas present almost 10 years ago, was charging next to him. It was still in the original plastic case, and it showed little wear.

Part of a cohort that came of age when people owned the songs they listened to and stored them on their digital devices rather than streaming them, Mr. Gressitt, 21, finds himself an outlier.