"Steve Jobs was able to gain mindshares at the record labels who were fearful at the time," Thomas said.īy mid-2004, iTunes was offering more than one million songs - just 1.5 percent of the U.S.
This was a radical shift for the music industry, one that took all of Jobs' charms and manipulations to pull off. Sure, offering legal online music sales was something the big labels were interested in doing, but they had been charging $16 or $18 per CD, and suddenly Steve Jobs says he'll sell their music for just $10, even less for just one track. Remember the disappointment of finding that the song you snagged from LimeWire was actually a poorly recorded cover instead of the real thing? Oh, the wasted time (and bandwidth)! Apple And though some objected to paying for music, what you got in return was quality. "They had a good library of music we really wanted to buy and listen to, had a great interface and a reasonable price."Īt $9.99 an album or 99 cents per song, Apple offered an affordable alternative to piracy. "There were folks doing this 10 years before, but I think the first one to really bring it to the market," Russ Crupnick, senior vice president of industry analysis at NPD Group, told NBC News. Once enough people realized that Napster and its kin were, in fact, breaking laws, legal alternatives were dreamed up by everybody with a stake in music or technology. Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing service, had been around before iTunes was a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eyes. The concept of downloading music wasn't a breakthrough.
"he attraction of all this could wane if Apple's first-mover advantage evaporates," he wrote. "Apple's new service has a good chance of winning over skeptics on both sides of the aisle, says one analyst," wrote PCWorld's Tom Mainelli following the unveiling of the iTunes Store.Īt the same time, others, such as the Guardian's Victor Keegan, expressed doubt. How is the entertainment industry different? And what does Apple have in store as iTunes enters its second decade?
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Now, on its 10th anniversary, with over 26 billion songs sold, iTunes remains an entertainment powerhouse, having expanded to movies and TV shows and, of course, apps.