HISTORY's Moment in Media: How the iPod Revolutionized Music -- and Beyond

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Once upon a time, your standard headphones cord was black. (For that matter, once upon a time, your headphones -- you know, those two earbuds connected by a piece of plastic or metal that wrapped around your head -- had cords.) Even more amazingly, once upon a time, you listened to portable music played from a tape or CD. If you were among the few who accessed digital music, you hunted to find the songs you wanted, you waited while they laboriously downloaded and you were almost certainly engaging in music piracy.

Then, on October 23, 2001 -- 21 years ago this month -- Steve Jobs went onstage at Apple's Cupertino, California, headquarters and introduced the first iPod. From that moment, how you listened to music, how you purchased music, what you expected from your personal devices and, yes, even the color of your electronics cables all changed forever.


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Before then, Apple made computers. It wasn't until 2007, in fact, that the corporate name changed from Apple Computer to simply Apple. The iPod was the company's first foray into consumer electronics. "Why music?" Jobs asked as he introduced the new technology. "Well, we love music, and it's always good to do something you love. More importantly, music is a part of everyone's life. Everyone! Music's been around forever; it will always be around. This is not a speculative market."

Not a speculative market, no. But digital music, until the iPod, was in a chaotic state, with a basically nonexistent market. The turn of the 21st century was the era of peer-to-peer music sharing, of Napster and Kazaa, when the explosion of personal computing power and growth of residential Internet bandwidth (or, perhaps more important, the widespread availability of high-speed connections on college campuses) began to permit the transfer of large media files. You could search the Internet from your kitchen table or dorm room, find songs that someone else in some other kitchen or dorm had "ripped" from their CDs, and then download those music files to your computer. A file might be corrupted, it could contain a virus, and even when everything went well the musicians earned no royalties. Then, if you wanted to listen to those songs anywhere but on your computer, you had to transfer them to a clunky MP3 player, which could hold maybe a dozen songs, or else just burn them onto a CD to play in your Discman.

In classic Apple form, the iPod changed all that. Built on a tiny new 5GB hard drive made by Toshiba, it could hold about 1,000 songs. Its technology allowed you to transfer music much faster. It was easy to use. ("I mastered the scroll-wheel interface in a couple of minutes," a columnist in Fortune shared.) And it looked cool, with the instantly recognizable white headphones cord made legendary in Apple's advertising. In 2003, Apple introduced iTunes, a simple, easy-to-use and legal way to buy and download music, each song for 99 cents. The digital music market was established. By the end of 2003, more than 25 million songs had been downloaded from iTunes.

But transforming the music industry wasn't enough. The iPod was also a way for Apple to get its products into our pockets. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to imagine how Apple might one day build other configurations of the iPod outfitted with, say, a larger full-color screen, or the ability to work with other iApps that manage videoclips and personal calendars," the Fortune writer speculated in a funny-in-retrospect analysis. "And while Apple never discusses work in progress, the iPod platform might also underpin a whole range of Apple consumer electronics devices, like a home content server or even an enhanced cell phone, each of which would link back to a Mac in some way."

In 2007, that "enhanced cell phone" was introduced, the iPhone. It looked not too different from the then-current iPod, the iPod Touch. The iPhone was a phone, a calendar, an e-mail and text device; it ran apps; and, oh yeah, it played digital music. The iPod enabled the iPhone, but in the world of the iPhone the iPod no longer served much purpose. Still, it lived past its 20th birthday. In May of this year, about midway between the release of the iPhone 13 and the iPhone 14, Apple announced that the iPod was discontinued.

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