The dominant arbiter of America’s musical tastes shifted from Billboard to the iTunes Top 100. (Consider that only six of the 111 albums to sell 10 million copies have been released since the iPod’s debut.) The decline in album sales led record stores to close their doors for good. The iTunes Music Store had shattered the tyranny of albums: Customers no longer had to buy an entire CD to get the one or two songs they really wanted. But the music business would never be the same. When the store opened to international consumers, it sold 100 million more songs in five months.īy early 2004, the New York Times would call the iPod - not Apple, but just the iPod - a billion-dollar business.
Then it sold 50 million more in the next four months. The iTunes Music Store was a huge success: It sold 1 million songs in a week and 50 million in a year. Forget 1,000 songs now you could have tens of thousands of songs in your pocket, even if you’d never owned the CD.
Sure, the promise of “any song” was overblown - several labels and artists wouldn’t license their music for Apple to sell, most famously the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC - but that didn’t deter customers. marshal striding into Dodge City to deliver law and order. Such micropayments had long been proposed and dismissed as a nonstarter for American consumers, but in an era when Napster was a household word and 12-year-olds were getting sued by the music industry for illegally downloading music, this was the equivalent of a U.S. Still, the iPod didn’t truly become transformative until April 2003, when Apple launched its online music store with this proposition: Get any song you want, legally, for 99 cents and play it on your iPod. As people started putting their CD collection into their computers, dictionaries were forced to come up with a new definition for “rip.”
Windows users clamored for a version they could use, too they got one in less than a year. Nevertheless, Apple sold 125,000 iPods in the first 60 days. The reviews were brutal, not least from those who saw this only as a toy for people with more dollars than sense, and the device synced only with Apple’s computers. It promised the never-ending mix tape, the opportunity to program a radio station that served a market of one: Fountains of Wayne to Janet Jackson to Nirvana to Alan Jackson to the Pretenders? No problem. This iPod - whatever that meant - was beautiful, and I wanted it bad. (The Washington Post)įour hundred bucks was more than my car payment, but I didn’t care. Because, Lord, it was expensive: $400 at a time when other digital-music players in the local Circuit City were going for about half that much.įrom a foray into mobile payments to a new smartwatch, the company announced a bevy of new products and services that represent the future of Apple's business. In fact, I was probably the target audience for the ad - young enough to feel passionate about new music, old enough to have the disposable income to afford this thing.
The first time I saw the ad, I was looking at a TV bookended by massive, wooden towers filled with hundreds of CDs (furniture that would very soon become obsolete). One thousand songs? Who in the world had the equivalent of 100 CDs that they’d want to hear on the go? Well, I did. What made the spot memorable was the promise in the voice-over at the end: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” It also benefited from the Apple marketing mystique: The first iPod commercial featured nothing more than a man dancing to a track by an obscure electronica band. Aesthetically, though, it was a revelation: smaller and lighter than its competitors, sporting an external design inspired by Dieter Rams and, yes, dead simple to operate. Technically, the iPod was little different than any other device on the market that played digitally compressed music. A user should be able to do anything with this in no more than three clicks.
When the iPod debuted, a few weeks after 9/11, it was the latest testament to the idiosyncrasy of Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs. Instead of an announcement, there was only the sad implication of a redirected online page, sending visitors not to information about the iPod Classic but rather to Apple’s home page. Yet the death Tuesday of the iconic iPod just before its 13th birthday went unacknowledged by that company and by a Silicon Valley crowd that wildly applauded the unveiling of a new phone and a smartwatch - products that stood on the slim, metal shoulders of its predecessor. Soon, it would transform music as we know it, inspire a business model built around pocket change and turn a struggling computer maker into the most valuable company in the world. It came in with a simple promise, a hefty price tag and a man with something white sticking in his ears bopping around his apartment.