Twenty years ago the only ways to purchase music you wanted to listen to was in a brick and mortar store, and you had to choose from either a cassette tape, a compact disc, or maybe a vinyl record if you were still living that dream. The price of an album was about 12 dollars on cassette and about six dollars more for a CD. If you only liked a band or artist’s hit single, you were usually forced to buy the whole album and take a chance on enjoying everything on it, or you could buy the single, which was still a good six or seven dollars. The consumer was usually the last person that the record industry really considered when pricing its wares.
All that changed though, with the advent of the MP3 file. Then when Steve Jobs got into the game, paradigms were shifting left and right. The mind behind Apple Computers and their immensely successful Macintosh line, was about to sink his teeth into the portable music industry, and things would never be the same again.
First You Need a Spark…
The MP3 file could end up being one of the single greatest catalysts for digital revolution for an entire generation. Suddenly, a song didn’t take up gobs of space on your hard drive. The math worked out to be about one megabyte of data for every one minute of song length. Soon, everyone with access to the software was “ripping” their song catalogs onto their hard drives and sharing them.
Services like Napster broke out into the mainstream, and the record industry was scrambling to shut them down. Screams of piracy could be heard echoing into the air from record executive offices all over the world. The advent of the MP3 also gave rise to a natural move, the portable, digital music player. Now you could carry a bunch of your own songs anywhere you went, and thanks to file sharing, you didn’t have to buy an entire LP to get the two or three songs you really wanted.
It wasn’t long until Jobs’ vision of where music players, and ultimately music commerce was headed, and soon the gears of Apple were whirring into motion.
The iPod
Some claim that when Jobs got Apple involved in the business of selling music that he was really just looking for a way to sell a new product. After all, if you can sell the device on which music is played, then why couldn’t you also package it all together and sell what goes on the devices in the first place? One other factor to remember is that in 2001, when the iPod was launched, most portable music players were big and bulky.
Jobs, in a way that was truly unique to him, decided to change the way people interacted with their technology, a common theme throughout his life. Jobs wanted Apple’s portable player to be smaller, sleeker, and hold many more songs than what was out on the market at the time. What the designers and engineers gave him was the first step towards a real Digital Revolution in the music industry.
The Apple iPod debuted on November 10th, 2011. It stored an ungodly number of tracks for the time. Jobs would say that it “puts 1,000 songs in your pocket.” It was much more compact than its competitors, and perhaps most importantly, it became an eventual conduit to the most important development in modern musical history: iTunes.
The Little Idea That Caused a Huge Change
As the record industry clamored for a way to shut down the boom in peer-to-peer file sharing that they saw as a direct threat to their solvency, Jobs and Apple were about to once again light a fuse on a bomb whose detonation would forever change how people acquire and listen to new music. Two years into its lifespan, the iPod gave entry to consumers’ computers in order to sync up their music libraries to their iPods. With that door open, the next logical step for Jobs was to create an online marketplace where people could purchase songs legally to put on their iPods.
However, if Jobs’ online music retailer had followed the same old practice of bundling together an album’s worth of tracks for around twenty dollars, there’s a good chance it might not have taken flight, at least not to the heights that it has reached. What this online marketplace, named iTunes did was to break down music purchase to the smallest fraction possible: a single track. Jobs and crew realized that the reason services like Napster were thriving is that people many times were just looking to get a hold of a single track that they happened to like at the time, and that they didn’t want to lay out a ton of money to get just one song.
The key element of iTunes subsequent success was the smallest of ideas. Why not allow people to buy tracks individually for a cheap price? It didn’t take long for folks to realize that they could go and buy the tracks they wanted for just 99 cents apiece, legally. No longer would music consumers on the whole be content with paying exorbitant prices for CDs. Physical album sales dropped and digital music sales have climbed steadily ever since. The advent of digital artwork gave consumers even more of a “traditional” music experience and still maintained the cheaper price point of digital consumption of music.
So What?
Ultimately Steve Jobs and Apple, through their iPods and iTunes did what they’ve always done. They innovated and in the process revolutionized an industry. The power was put back in the hands of the people who actually support musical endeavors. Single tracks went from being the tools of radio, and became an actual qualitative and quantitative commodity.
There are some that argue that MP3s, iTunes and iPods killed off an older and essential piece of the music industry, the record store. Perhaps though, much like with many things in this new modern era, the record store has taken its next necessary evolutionary step? After all, with the emerging popularity of services like Spotify, which is surely an offspring of iTunes, people can just use social media, like Facebook, for the purposes of sharing and discussing the music they love, and after all, isn’t that what music is all about?
Finally, on a purely personal note, as a musician who came of age in the iTunes era, and whose former band you can find on iTunes, I wish to personally say “Thank you Steve, your work and influence will never be forgotten.”