Sure they do. I've got a Sansa Clip that I bought back in 2008 for $50 that's still going strong, especially now that I've loaded Rockbox on it and it can play formats other than MP3. iPods especially are famous for basically living forever, especially if you flash-mod them (replace the hard drive with something solid state, like an SD card), possibly also replacing the battery if it's stopped holding a charge.

DIY repair work isn't for everyone, but it doesn't get much easier than fixing an old iPod (the older the better).

[–] StorminNorman@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I've got 3 iPods. The nano I got way back in like 2006, and two gen4s I bought 5yrs ago. They've all been modded with new batteries and ssds, but they all work just fine.

[–] pedz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.

I'm an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.

Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don't mind using yt-dlp.

Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I'm still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.

The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.