On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs took to the stage with a strange little box in his hands that would forever change the world and its perception of music and, with it, its contents. It was the day the iPod was introduced to the world.
One of the highlights of Steve Jobs’ presentation of the original iPod was its ability to store over 1000 songs.
Over the years, the iPod has become one of the most influential tech devices of all time. There were many media players, and some were technically better than the iPod. However, no other media player dominated the zeitgeist like the iPod.
Therefore, when Apple finally decided to discontinue the iPod touch for good, wiping out the iPod lineup, Apple fans and iPod-owners must have felt a little nostalgic. It really is the end of an era.
The iPod has fundamentally changed the way people consume not just music but content in general. We take a look at exactly how Apple and the iPod have changed the way we think about music and content in general.
Your entire music collection in your pocket
Before the iPod, people had the Sony Walkman as their personal music player. Make no mistake, it was a great piece of engineering and was influential in revolutionizing music. However, the Walkman practically became an antique the day Apple introduced the iPod. The Walkman allowed you to take a few cassettes with you and was limited to the number of songs on those tapes. Even if you carry 5-10 cassettes, you can take a maximum of 250 songs with you.
The iPod has quadrupled that number. It was as if Apple gave you the ability to take your entire music collection with you wherever you go. Although Apple boasted that the first iPod could hold over 1000 songs, people could download up to 1500 songs onto the device. Those with the higher storage capacity could store four times as much. What this did was give people the power of choice.
The power of choice
With this newfound ability to choose one song from a thousand possible ones, the way people thought about content and media consumption changed. With the ability to carry your entire music library in the palm of your hand, you now had instant access to everything you wanted to hear. The immediacy with which one could jump from one track to another made people feel like they had limitless possibilities. Also, with most cassettes you would generally have that one song that you really liked, but to buy that one song you had to buy the entire cassette and search through the cassette to find that one song.
The iPod gave you the ability to listen to just the music you wanted. Here’s a device that lets you rewrite the rules of the cassette, choose only the songs you like, and offers better audio quality than most Walkmans. This, in turn, had a downward impact on the way music and content was produced and the economies associated with it.
The economics of producing and selling music
The 1980s and 1990s were a time when music producers sold whole cassettes to make money. This meant that typically any “album” release would generally contain a great piece of music accompanied by some not-so-great work by the artist. With the advent of the iPod and digital music, producers had to ensure that every song on the album they were producing had to be good. Gone are the days when they could just issue cassettes with a decent song or two and expect the audience to pay for 10-15 mediocre songs as well.
And with the proliferation of the internet and the ability to download individual songs, music labels had to find a new way to make money. That’s when the concept of pay-per-download came into play, followed by pay-per-stream. And since the count associated with downloads and streams was digital and accessible to artists, record companies had to share their earnings honestly with artists.
Control your own media
People who have had cassette players or even CD players at some point know how difficult they were to maintain. With cassettes it was even more difficult. Even in the best cassette players, the magnetic tapes were often scratched or completely mutilated. Just because you’ve bought a cassette once doesn’t mean you own the music on it forever. Most of the time you would have to buy the same cartridge twice because the cartridges just wouldn’t last long. And the more you played, the more the magnetic tape deteriorated. Digital libraries like the iPod have never had such problems.
Also, with cassettes, you could never switch between tracks or skip to another track as efficiently as with an iPod. Additionally, the ability to shuffle songs and randomly play any songs from your collection was a game changer.
Content streaming today
The effects of the associated changes in media consumption are still visible today. The iPod may not have been the first mobile device that allowed users to stream content directly from the internet, but the business model followed by most streaming giants like Spotify or Netflix can be traced back to the iPod and how music production labels have responded to the change scenario that brought it. From the economics to the interface of streaming media players, much can be attributed to the iPod.
In the two decades that it’s been part of our cultural zeitgeist, the iPod has to be among the most influential tech devices to ever exist. It truly shaped the most important cultural revolution of our generation.
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