iPod, iPhone and the birth of Apple Music
How the iPod become the Everything Phone
Back in 2007, Steve Jobs took to the stage to announce “three revolutionary products… an iPod, a phone and an internet device”. But these were not three discrete products. They were one device: the iPhone. “The iPod changed everything in 2001,” Jobs said. “And we’re going to do it again with the iPhone in 2007.”
The iPhone was the second iTunes phone: the first, Motorola’s ROKR, was launched in 2005 with a palpable lack of enthusiasm by Jobs. Maybe it was the lack of storage space – where an iPod could store 1,000 songs, the ROKR only had room for 100 – or the slow USB connection and lack of wireless data transfer. The ROKR was in actual fact a ‘disastr’.
But the iPhone wasn’t. Although compared to today’s iPhones it was laughably primitive (and at the launch, incomplete: Steve Jobs’ presentation was squeaky-bum time for Apple engineers who knew that the prototype was far from finished). It didn’t run third-party apps, it only had a slow Edge data connection and it lacked basic features such as copy and paste. But none of that mattered: as it did with the iPod, Apple had learnt from other phone makers’ mistakes and made something that just worked.
Apple sold 51 million iPods in 2007 and 1.39 million iPhones, but iPod sales started to decline in 2009 as the iPhone got more capable and more popular. iPod sales dropped from 54 million in 2009 to just 14 million in 2014; meanwhile iPhone sales went from 20 million to an icredible 169 million in the same period. By 2015, Apple was selling over 200 million iPhones a year and was no longer reporting iPod sales as a separate category.
Reach out and touch me
The problem was simple: the iPod did one thing, music, brilliantly. But when the App Store was added in 2008, the iPhone was increasingly able to do everything brilliantly. Music was just another app.
Apple didn’t give up on the iPod though: it launched the iPod touch in 2007, effectively stripping the phone bit out of the iPhone to make a more affordable do-everything device. But as iPhone sales soared and the iPad joined the Apple family, it’s fair to say that the iPod was very low down Apple’s list of priority projects. The last of the click-wheel iPods, the iPod classic, wasn’t updated after 2007 and was discontinued in 2014; the iPod touch went from an annual update cycle between 2007 and 2010 to a biannual one, and when the fifth-generation iPod touch was launched in 2015, Apple didn’t refresh it for another four years.
It wasn’t just the iPhone. Music was changing too. In 2008, a new service launched in the US that did things very differently to Apple. That service was called Spotify.
Perfect piracy storm
Despite its billions of sales, the Apple Music Store didn’t kill music piracy. Spotify and YouTube did. A perfect storm of technologies – faster internet and mobile internet connections, iPhones and iPads, better audio formats – meant that you could listen legally to pretty much anything ever recorded for free if you didn’t mind the odd advert, or a low monthly fee if you did. By 2011 Spotify had one million paying subscribers; today it has 165 million, with another 200 million on the ad-funded version.
As great as music streaming is, some of us still want to hold our music – there’s a big trade in iPod classics on eBay – and many people are embracing older audio formats such as vinyl and cassettes. They’re often doing that to complement streaming, so for example in mid-2021 Billie Eilish made a mint green cassette version of her new album specifically for her Spotify fans; you can buy it for £4.99.
Vinyl is so popular that pressing plants have huge backlogs: more than one million vinyl records were sold in the UK in the first three months of 2021, and in the US sales of vinyl now outstrip those of CDs. But those numbers pale in comparison to the numbers of people streaming their music, which is why Apple Music exists. Apple bought Beats Music, turned it into Apple Music and launched it in 2015; it had 11 million subscribers in its first year and an estimated 72 million by the end of 2020.
Apple didn’t invent digital music, the MP3 player, the download store, the smartphone or music streaming. And it probably won’t invent whatever music technology is in the future. But 20 years after the original iPod, we’re can’t wait to hear what Apple does next.
iPod sales started to decline as the iPhone got more capable and more popular