iPod and the birth of iTunes

Apple put 1,000 songs in your pocket. But where were we getting those songs from?

THE iPOD WAS a big hit for all kinds of reasons. It was better than the competition, it was easy to use, and it had white headphones that would become the focus of an iconic ad campaign.

The first iPod campaign included one of Steve Jobs’ pet hates: people. Jobs preferred not to use real people in ads because no one person would appeal to everybody. And this particular ad, according to Ken Segall, who worked on ad campaigns with Apple, was “uncomfortable to watch… it was a young guy trying to act cool, and doing so in a fairly pitiful way.”

In 2003 Apple’s ad agency Chiat/Day came up with the idea of using dark silhouettes of people with bright white headphones on primary colored backgrounds. Jobs hated it until he saw how many iPods it was selling. Something else happened in 2003 that sent iPod sales into orbit: Apple released iTunes for Windows. Apple had grudgingly enabled PC compatibility via the PC music app MusicMatch, but in 2003 Apple launched iTunes for Windows.

Jobs had been against making the iPod Windows–friendly, but while Mac sales were

declining, iPods were doing ever increasing numbers — and every iPod sold to a PC user was an opportunity to show just how green the grass was on the Apple side.

FIGHT FOR YOUR DIGITAL RIGHTS

There was a problem with all those iPods, however. The music industry wasn’t getting paid for the music people were listening to. At best people were ripping songs from CDs; at worst, they were pirating them from illegal download sites. Apple decided to offer a solution: the iTunes Music Store.

The iTunes Music Store launched in the US first, in April 2003, with 200,000 songs. It was a really simple proposition: buy any song in the catalogue for 99 cents and own it forever. Apple was now involved in everything from helping you discover music to helping you listen to it, all on Apple devices. By early 2003, Apple said it had sold nearly three quarters of a million iPods.

Apple’s fixed 99¢ price was greeted with horror by record labels who wanted $3 per track, and Apple found it hard to get labels to sign even one–year deals. It didn’t have problems getting them to sign after the first year, though. iTunes sold a million songs in its first week. Before long, if you weren’t on iTunes you weren’t selling much digital music. If you were on iTunes, you were helping to sell iPods. iTunes Music Store files used digital rights management technology (DRM) to lock your purchases to you, and that DRM didn’t work on other music players: if you bought it from iTunes, you had to play it on your Apple device. Apple didn’t drop DRM until 2007. In 2006, Apple sold its billionth iTunes song and its 100 millionth iPod.