When on October 23, 2001 Steve Jobs, in the course of the traditional announcement of Apple news, exclaimed “boom, that’s iPod” presenting the portable music player, few could have imagined the enormous scale of the digital revolution and how it would transform the music industry. in the years to come. In that year, the record companies were only at the beginning of the serious crisis that would have accompanied them for almost a decade. Napster, the first real thorn in the side, thanks to its sixty million users around the world who illegally exchanged music from their archives, in the same year had just suspended its activity under the blows of American justice, but this software program would be followed other killer applications with devastating effects. Half of the turnover of the sector disappeared in the whirlpool of piracy before Apple itself, in 2003, after a long negotiation with the record majors, joined the first online music store where it was possible to buy individual songs for 99 cents.
Anyone who is twenty today may have never seen (and used) this iPod
“Portable music” was nothing new when the iPod was born: music fans had experienced for years the revolution introduced earlier by the Sony Walkman, which had offered the great opportunity to listen to music on the go, and other mp3 players. then. What changed the scenario was the fact that the iPod immediately became an icon for enthusiasts, immediately becoming an object of desire thanks to the coolest computer brand in the world and the innovative features of portability and space, in addition to the fact which was equipped with its own innovative application to create playlists and archive songs, namely iTunes, which became the first online store, thus starting the first great revolution in the sector with the download of millions of tracks available to consumers.
The anniversary
Twenty years ago the Apple of today was born with the iPod
by Bruno Ruffilli
The record market, still in the middle of the ford, with a hemorrhage of sales on the physical product on the one hand and with a piracy linked to file sharing on the other, was struggling to get out of the crisis, but the road was marked. The share of the digital market continued to grow and at the same time the legal offer was gaining ground on piracy.
In 2005, the download thus reaches the first billion dollars globally out of a total of 20 billion in turnover in the sector. The digital transition got a new and further boost from the transformation of the iPod into a telephone, with the advent of the iPhone. Innovation at that point was the beacon that would guide the music industry towards new business models, which saw the sector evolve from downloading to video and audio streaming. The move from ownership to access has radically changed consumption by offering us all a huge and virtually unlimited library of legal music.
The anniversary
The world before and after the iPod
by Ernesto Assante
Today there are over 70 million songs online and every day, on a platform like Spotify alone, over sixty thousand new tracks are uploaded. There are nearly 500 million people around the world who subscribe to a paid music service, with emerging countries transitioning in some cases from the cassette era directly to streaming. Piracy has in fact been reduced to a minimum with a huge offer and access models ranging from premium subscription to advertising-supported free. At the same time, the creative dynamics have also changed and new repertoires and generations of artists have established themselves in the digital age. The possibilities for artists have expanded, many more talents than in the past have reached the top of the sales charts. From 2015 onwards the recording market started to rise again and in 2021 also in Italy the growth percentage was double-digit, with a real boom in subscribers to music platforms. Nowadays, digital music represents over 80% of revenues, most of which come from streaming, while downloading, Steve Jobs’ first great intuition, is heading towards its inexorable decline; Apple itself competes with Spotify, Amazon and other platforms in the arena of streaming music, interactive playlists and new audio formats that represent the definitive maturity of a journey that began with this magical cult device.
* Ceo FIMI, Italian Music Industry Federation
Twenty Years of iPod: When Music Has Changed
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