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by drewmol
3107 days ago
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Certainly. I wanted to provide some insight to the dynamics of the iPod/iTunes situation. Interestingly as you noted
>A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market. I think Apples success at creating this market was a byproduct of it being fundemental pairing for the iPod's sucesss. Without the iPod, iTunes would likely have gone the same way as the rest of the early legal digital music sellers. Without the existence of a large collection of mostly 'pirated' mp3's sitting on home desktops and office networks across the globe, the iPod probably would not have taken off. Apple provided great utility for those collections by selling the iPod. Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable. |
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True enough, and you most certainly have a point about the iPod also helping, that's something I haven't really factored in that much.
To me, iTunes was mostly a great example how usability, pricing, and ease of legal access to content matters. Much earlier versions of iTunes UI was very reminiscent of mp3 sharing clients popular at that time (Limewire/Napster/Whatnot) by sorting titles in long lists and making getting them as easy as pressing a "download" button right next to it.
The choice of pricing, single songs for $.99 [0], also felt like it contributed a lot to a paradigm shift how music is sold and consumed, acknowledging established trends in priacy by allowing legitimate customers more freedom in paying for only those songs they want.
[0] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/03/04/28/1723226/apple-intr...