How Steve Jobs’ iPod and iTunes Revolutionized Music
"A Billion songs sold ..." iTunes changed how we all buy music.
In the process he helped push us further from the world of buying CDs in physical form because suddenly there was music democracy. Rather than propping up the dying CD as a format, Jobs and iTunes made it okay to buy music online and tell the record labels what we wanted rather than having their system forced down our throats. If you didn’t want to buy an album full of filler, you didn’t have to – you could go online to the iTunes store and for ten bucks buy your own personalized “Greatest Hits” collection. And it was completely legal.
Yet he also opened the distribution world up to the masses. Prior to iTunes, you could go online and steal any album you wanted, but there was always the sense that you were one step away from the RIAA suing you to the point of bankruptcy if you made a wrong move. What iTunes did was make it possible for a user to find any album covered under its licensing deal and buy it immediately. Talk about opening up worlds of musical discovery to the masses!
When I was a teenager, prior to having access to the Internet my only way to purchase new music was to buy from WalMart or wait for an album to be available from one of the many “record clubs” I subscribed to. In rare instances I’d get the opportunity to drive an hour or two to a city with a decent record store, but for the most part I had to bide my time and money and then buy the music which was available. That system worked well enough if something I wanted was in the pop vein, but I spent years slowly collecting music from outside the mainstream.
Kids today can thank Steve Jobs for the fact that they’ve got it all at their fingertips. Any album can build a reputation online and find an audience. It’s no longer necessary to have your music distributed into a brick-and-mortar store, and that seemed truly revolutionary even a decade ago. Playlists took off, as it became popular to ask famous people “what’s on your iPod?”
Jobs wasn’t happy just leading the mp3 revolution. He spent the rest of his life working to transform cell phones to “smart” phones, laptops into sleek “notepads.”
It has been said that Jobs was rarely the first person to do something, but when he did it, he did it so well everyone else had to follow him or get out of the business. That’s going to be his legacy. Whether anyone has the skills and the personality to forge a path into the next decade of creation in his image remains to be seen, but no one’s going to be forgetting his impact any time soon.
Jobs refused to have life saving surgery in spite of being told the consequences, by the time he changed his mind–9 months later–the cancer had spread and metastasized–and he was doomed
Look at this clip from Sundays CBS 60 min interview with Jobs biographer
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/20/60minutes/main20123269.shtml
“I’ve asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, ‘I didn’t want my body to be opened…I didn’t want to be violated in that way,’” Isaacson recalls.
So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson.
Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision,
Isaacson replies, “I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking…we talked about this a lot,” he tells Kroft. “He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it….I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”
He finally had the surgery and told his employees about it, but played down the seriousness of his condition.
Isaacson says he was receiving cancer treatments in secret even though he was telling everyone he was cured.”
So in the end Jobs ” reality distortion zone ” did not work out for him –
I never said he was perfect or lacked flaws … clearly a knowledge of his life reveals he was as flawed as anyone. This article, however, focuses specifically on his innovations in the music sphere.
Please. Apple is so 2000′s.
In regards to music storage, I still have a mountain of vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, and CD’s in addition to my ipod. Of them all, the ipod is awesome and a daily companion.
I will need to read the complete story of Mr. Steve Jobs sometime soon. I can only imagine there will be themes of life, independence, rebellion, capitalism, tenacity, imagination, vision only to name a few.
I don’t know that much about Mr. Jobs, but what this man accomplished is truly remarkable.
I’m definitely interested in reading the book when it comes out next week.
I was always a big home stereo guy. You know- separate components, big effin speakers, wires everywhere. What did I want with an mp3 player? Then I got one and wondered how I ever lived without one. I chucked all the hi-fi gear shortly after- all my music is on a 160Gb iPod and a laptop and an external hard drive.
Steve Jobs changed the way human beings experience music. Not a bad legacy. RIP and well done, sir.
Amen. brother! I’m a 61 year old fart that can remember buying 45s and being thrilled to death to be able to play the Beatles “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” over and over. Used to pi$$ the old man off. Now, two ounces ( if that) of Nano takes care of my needs.
Steve Jobs brought mp3′s to the tech challenged. But mp3 was already a very heavily used format when Apple released its first player. Apple was very late to the party. Personally I would never use apple due to Itunes, uploading illegal songs scares the hell out of me.
MP3 codec was invented in 87 and was heavily traded on news servers in the early 90′s. That said i am in awe of the customer satisfaction. Apple is a rockstar in the texh world. Millions line up to blow that paycheck.
Why is an occubagger’s i-mac worth $5500?
all the crappy itunes residing on it…
Jobs told Obama he is going to be a one-term president because his policies were so anti-business.
If you leave a 5500 dollar piece of hardware in a park full of homeless, vagrants and street urchins. You should not be surprised when it grows legs and walks out of the primordial ooze. he should have asked his genius bar if it was safe to leave it there.
I, too, have an IPOD classic. It is beautiful hardware. I just wish it were easier to sync when using different computers and libraries that I own woithout dumping the current content. Maybe I am just slow. My wife has an IPAD, which is just as elegant. But why should she have to use ITUNES everytime she wants to put an app on it? You cannot even plug a hardrive into it.
I believe some of the ‘lore’ is that Apple is for progressive, grungy, snobby, smart, tenured, pompous, pacifist, liberal, marajuana smoking, 99 percent, prius driving, littering, free range chicken eater, behind on your mortgage, indebted, too good to work for McDonalds, sociology major, marxist occupiers of wallstreet.
No wonder the Queen recieved such a wonderful Chinese made IPOD as a state gift from Obama.
I am seriously looking at android.
Er… Here are some “fleabagger”/”Marxist” Mac users:
* Rush Limbaugh (longtime diehard Machead)
* Karl Rove
* George W. Bush
Many prominent conservative/libertarian bloggers are also outspoken Mac users, such as
* Instapundit
* Melissa Clouthier
Time to go earn my keep (on Mac hardware
)
I have one too…..I’m just saying…
For what it’s worth, I use a Zune 120 for listening and found the Zune Marketplace along with Zune Pass to be MUCH more friendly than iTunes.
I’ve got no real beef with Jobs or Apple, but I’ve used both and made my choice.
I love the convenience of MP3 players, but I hate what they have done to the album as an artform. We are headed back to the days when the music industry focused on singles, and albums were an afterthought. Maybe it doesn’t matter when it comes to a Britney Spears song, but plenty of music is meant to be appreciated as part of an album.
Yes, thanks to Jobs, we have been spared the indignity of ever buying another Dark Side of the Moon, or Graceland, or Rubber Soul, or Thriller, or Brothers in Arms, or Aja.
To be fair, there have been few concept albums as enjoyable as those that have been recorded in the last decade.
Honestly, when the iPod was released, I thought to myself “nobody would be silly enough to buy this.” Archos had done it first, done it better, and done it cheaper, and the iPod was a pale imitation. From the beginning, the iPod depended on complicated, closed software that originally only ran on the Apple. The Archos was open and viewable in Windows Explorer like a thumb-drive is.
Boy, was I wrong about nobody buying the iPod. This is why I am not a marketer, and never will be.
I’m happy to say that I’ve never owned an Apple product, and will never.
I don’t know if alternative MP3 players or tablets are superior to Apple; what has always made me balk is the Apple price tag, which is always higher. I have an MP3 player, but it’s a Sony. It has 16 gigs, and it works with Windows Media Player, which (believe it or not) is a lot more open and convenient to use than iTunes. That said, the new iPods with the touch interface are really tempting – and I’ll probably wind up buying an iPad sooner or later.
The iPod ecosystem has essentially killed off record “Labels” as we have known them – Good Riddance. Those folks were sharks that even the Hollywood Movie Sharks were scared of.Technology was forcing this anyway – the iPod accelerated the process.
Dr. Shalit
Sorry, Napster and other peer to peer shareware revolutionized music. Jobs merely developed a way to get money from it.
What? You don’t like money? Think about it. It’s the American dream. Who here hasn’t thought “I can do that better” or “If only…). More power to the guy.