How Steve Jobs And The iPod Changed Music Forever

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How Steve Jobs And The iPod Changed Music Forever

On Oct 06, 2011

Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these. - Steve Jobs on the iPod

It’s no new news now that Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, October 5, and being that he’s been one of the most influential characters in the evolution of worldwide technology, I figured it right to address how he and Apple managed to change music sales and accessibility forever simply by releasing the iPod.

So goes the numbers from last year, there’s over 297 million iPods working at the moment across the globe, and if you take a glance at the racks in record stores, you’ll notice that CD surplus isn’t something that’s difficult to come by. I’ll run back four years ago when my car was stuffed from folder to dashboard to door side slots to glove compartment to floor with compacts, when I actually kept a shelf in my room to hold down my collection, and come back to the present where the only times I’ve spent cash on picking up a CD is to grab a novelty copy of Outkast’s Aquemini or Big L’s Lifestylez of da Poor & Dangerous.

Travel just about anywhere, and all you’re going to find is water ruined tracklist booklets, dust covered cases and burned CDs being used as coasters, because the digital push in music sales has made the one-time innovation mostly obsolete. It was a flash compared to the cassette tape to compact disk transition—relatively five years if you cut out the previous five since the iPod’s 2001 debut where it had to catch on while people saved up the cash for the purchase. Simple vision knocked an era off with ease, all due to Steve Jobs, who saw a market of clunky digital cameras, camcorders, mp3 players and more all waiting to be conglomerated into one pocket-sized carryall.

If you check the successes of an album’s release, Billboard is still the primary turn, though iTunes is a close second as measure, all due to the fact that they’ve become the main Internet outlet for purchasing whatever you’re looking for alongside Amazon. While this has led to a massive increase in music piracy, in ways, it’s still become a major savior for artists’ gains from an LP, and the thought behind track previews, individual purposes, and soundclouds has made purchasing all the more user friendly, and tuned specifically to the consumer’s wishes. Sure, most music is comped for free, and the ratio between illegal rips and sales is vast, though the efforts of Jobs’ idea is one still fueling the outlet.

"We're trying to compete with piracy. We're trying to pull people away from piracy and say, 'You can buy these songs legally for a fair price.' If the price goes up people will go back to piracy, then everybody loses. The labels make more money from selling tracks on iTunes than when they sell a CD. There are no marketing costs for them. If they want to raise the prices it just means they're getting a little greedy." Steve Jobs, Associated Press, Sept. 20, 2005

In terms of accessibility, Jobs seemed to have dragged something from the future into the present—I carry about 80GB of tracks around with me everyday, which comes out to relatively 18,000 songs, and, to throw in some comparison, it’s practically more convenient to have in my pocket than my wallet when it comes down to size. The average CD holds about 80 minutes of music, so if you break it down to the average song length of say, 3:35, you’ve got something like 18 tracks at your disposal. I’m not going to do the numbers here, but you can imagine the impossibility of heaving around a CD collection in comparison.

"If the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free [on CDs], what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM-protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies." - Steve Jobs,"Thoughts on Music," Feb. 6, 2007

What it comes down to is that Jobs flipped music with his idea. I’m not even going to go into the other aspects of the iPod simply for keeping this one strict to sounds, but every nook and face of the industry has been touched by his product. The range of iPods has come to meet affordability for most people, the industry holds a new means of sale that’s proven successful, and more music than anyone could ever need goes just about anywhere. The life of every kin product released by other companies, such as the Zune, has been snubbed with ease, and in the end of it, Jobs’ drive with the iPod, iTunes, and their companions is unrivaled. We’re staring at something now where it’s difficult to imagine what the next evolution could be in a Digital Age where the new idea seems always visible nearby, so if you can think of what it is that’s going to make the iPod obsolete, then get a quick patent, because you’re holding the billion dollar blueprint.

"We were very lucky -- we grew up in a generation where music was an incredibly intimate part of that generation. More intimate than it had been, and maybe more intimate than it is today, because today there's a lot of other alternatives. We didn't have video games to play. We didn't have personal computers. There's so many other things competing for kids' time now. But, nonetheless, music is really being reinvented in this digital age, and that is bringing it back into people's lives. It's a wonderful thing. And in our own small way, that's how we're working to make the world a better place." - Steve Jobs, Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003