Apple Launches iTunes Retailer, Revolutionizing the Music Trade

On April 28, 2003, underneath the slogan, “Rock and roll won’t ever die. It’s, nonetheless, being reborn”, Apple supremo Steve Jobs introduced the launch of the iTunes Music Retailer, the primary legally approved platform for purchasing and downloading digital music. The shop, obtainable just for Mac customers, held 200,000 songs in its library, and was launched along with all 5 main file firms.

The iTunes Music Retailer would quickly develop into the most important music vendor on the planet (reaching that focus on in February 2010) – and set in movement a revolution in the way in which that music is consumed. It took the present iTunes platform, a music-playing app that allowed its customers to add present CDs to a digital library after which obtain them to a transportable MP3 participant, and made it right into a strategy to uncover new music… and, crucially, to purchase music.

iTunes started life two years earlier, with the launch of the first-generation iPod, Apple’s homegrown MP3 participant, boasting “1,000 songs in your pocket”. It wasn’t the primary MP3 participant available on the market, but it surely was probably the most user-friendly, and shortly grew to become a stand-out product for the corporate.

However with the rise of digital music had come the rise of digital piracy – and the large labels have been anxious. Previous to MP3 information, music needed to be bought in bodily codecs (or else surreptitiously taped off the radio, which led to the ludicrous “Dwelling Taping Is Killing Music” marketing campaign of the Eighties). However in 1999 Napster had launched, and, together with a plethora of different file-sharing websites, created an enormous community for peer-to-peer music sharing. With individuals illegally downloading songs straight from one another’s arduous drives, there was merely no have to exit and purchase CDs any extra.

By February 2001 Napster was boasting over 26 million customers worldwide, and, within the face of high-profile lawsuits – together with from Metallica and Dr. Dre – the service was shut down in 2002.

However by then the genie was out of the bottle: Napster might have been no extra, however by the very nature of the web, peer-to-peer file sharing had develop into virtually inconceivable to control. As bodily gross sales dwindled and piracy rocketed, Steve Jobs noticed a possibility.

Jobs satisfied the “Massive 5” file firms (Warner Music, Common, Sony, BMG, and EMI) to let Apple legally promote their content material through iTunes. His argument was that most individuals weren’t pirating music as a result of they wished to interrupt the legislation, however just because it was handy. In the event that they got a simple strategy to pay for it, he informed the labels, nearly all of them would.

“Customers don’t need to be handled like criminals and artists don’t need their useful work stolen,” wrote Steve Jobs in Apple’s announcement of the shop. “The iTunes Music Retailer gives a groundbreaking resolution for each.”

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For the file labels, it was a no brainer, a win-win state of affairs. If the iTunes Retailer have been to show a failure and music continued to be downloaded illegally, they may merely pull out once more, with out having to have arrange their very own expensive digital infrastructure – and blame the entire debacle on the Cupertino upstarts. If it have been to succeed, nonetheless, then at a stroke the pirates could be killed off… and the cash prepare may begin rolling once more.

It not solely succeeded, however did so spectacularly. Within the first 18 hours following its American launch on April 28, 2003, the iTunes retailer bought over 270,000 tracks, and greater than 1,000,000 inside its first week. After it was rolled out to Home windows PCs in addition to Macs in October 2003, it shifted an extra million songs in simply three days. By December 2003, Apple introduced that it had bought 25 million songs by the platform; 4 months later that determine had risen to 85 million.

Jobs was proper: most music lovers didn’t need the effort and potential virus danger that got here with pirated music websites, and given a strategy to simply and securely pay for MP3s, would gladly take it. Shortly earlier than the iTunes Retailer’s 10-year anniversary in February 2013, Apple proudly declared that songs bought by the Retailer had handed the 25 billion mark.

The celebrations have been to be short-lived – as a result of by then the writing was already on the digital wall.

A brand new type of music supply service by the title of Spotify had launched in the US in July 2011, providing a six-month trial interval, throughout which new customers may stream an infinite quantity of music. Though the unique concept was that after the free interval expired non-subscribers could be restricted to 10 hours of streaming a month, that was quickly deserted: that means that when you have been ready to place up with a few adverts each six or so songs, you can hearken to no matter you wished, as a lot as you wished, with out paying a penny for it.

Spotify would eclipse even the iTunes Retailer’s success. In August 2012, Time reported 15 million lively Spotify customers, with 4 million of them paying subscribers. By March 2013, that had risen to 24 million lively customers and 6 million subscribers, which grew to 40 million customers (together with ten million paying) the next yr.

Spotify reached 100 million complete customers in June 2016, 400 million by 2022, and, as of March 2024, over 615 million month-to-month lively customers, together with 239 million paying subscribers.

If Steve Jobs was proper about individuals preferring to pay for music reasonably than illegally obtain it, it appeared that they’d additionally reasonably legally hear free of charge than pay. In 2015 Apple changed iTunes with its personal streaming service, Apple Music; and the iTunes Retailer was relegated to a relatively-hidden nook of the app.

Such is the breakneck pace of progress within the digital age, that simply 21 years after its launch and solely 14 years because it grew to become the largest music vendor on the planet, the iTunes Retailer already appears an archaic idea, a museum relic belonging alongside the Sony Walkman, stackable file gamers and even the iPod itself.

But its significance stays incontestable. With out Steve Jobs convincing the file labels to get on board with digital, with out it popularizing MP3 gamers – and ultimately music on smartphones – it’s uncertain that streaming companies like Spotify would exist in any respect.

“No matter anybody says about Apple, if it wasn’t for Steve Jobs there could be no official music on-line,” Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine informed Fortune journal in 2009. “I feel his influence on music has been extraordinary.”