Don't Steal Music: How the iPod Changed the World
Twenty years ago, Apple introduced the iPod to the world, a portable music player widely believed to revolutionize the industry. How the iPod gained such popularity and why users believe that Apple, thanks to its gadget, defeated piracy - in the material "Gazeta.Ru". techqueer
First iPod
On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPod
with the slogan "1000 songs in your pocket." The first version of the
portable music player came with a 5GB or 10GB hard drive and connected only to
MacOS computers, and was controlled by a physical scroll wheel.
In his keynote address, Jobs described the Mac as the hub of
Apple's digital lifestyle and the new iPod as an ultra-portable music add-on to
that lifestyle. A 5 GB iPod was offered at a price of $ 399 (about 28 thousand
rubles at the current exchange rate) and could hold up to 1000 songs. The
player had a 10-hour battery life, a black and white LCD screen, was equipped
with today's outdated FireWire connectivity standard, and the iPod sticker read
Don't Steal Music.
The line of "classic" iPods came out until 2007,
with support for Windows, USB, color screen and hard drives up to 160 GB.
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In culture
The iPod kicked off Apple's quest to make music the mainstay
of its customers' lives by finding a simpler and easier way to distribute songs
than massive CD players and other MP3 players. Music is more a part of Apple
today than ever: in 2020, the company made $ 4.1 billion (about 288 billion
rubles) from Apple Music, and the iPhone is now, in fact, a modern version of
the original iPod twenty years ago.
It is believed that by introducing the iPod, Apple not only
made it easier for users to listen to and buy music, but also helped musicians
make money from their work by defeating piracy and began to pay them for
purchases in iTunes and Apple Music. However, leading analyst at Mobile
Research Group Eldar Murtazin believes that Apple did not defeat piracy thanks
to the iPod and iTunes, but rather destroyed the music industry.
“Steve Jobs has cracked the market in terms of prices -
previously, the prices for physical media, if you buy an album on a conditional
CD, were higher. The iPod took off relatively, with not very large sales.
Several million pieces per quarter - this is not very significant for the
market as a whole. The iPod has largely destroyed, in the literal sense of the
word, the music industry, because it deprived record companies and musicians of
money, ”Murtazin said.
It is also widely believed among apple fans that the white
iPod earbuds became iconic at the time, and Apple has used them in
advertisements over the years. The most popular advertising image for
headphones and iPods is the silhouettes of people wearing white headphones,
which stand out in the big picture thanks to their color. Some users note that
these headphones were something like a fashionable handbag, thanks to which it
was possible to define "their" person.
“Apple knows how to impose visual images, and this led to
the fact that when the iPod became quite popular, their white headphones became
a reflection of the fact that“ I listen to this kind of music, ”said Murtazin.
The expert also noted that the most memorable Apple player
for him was the iPod Classic with a hard drive, thanks to which he could
download a sufficient amount of music on a trip.
“Oddly enough, the iPod Classic was one of those players
that sounded good with the branded headphones removed,” the analyst said.
