By William Gallagher, BBC | On April 28, 2003, Steve Jobs announced the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs and a few exclusives that not only changed the record industry then, it paved the way to today’s streaming.
It’s unlikely that you have said or thought the word “iTunes” in at least a couple of years. Back in 2021, Apple broke up the iTunes app into separate ones for music, tv and so on, and it was right to do so because it had become peculiarly confusing.
There’s much to still be confused about, too, as iTunes has been split up, but the iTunes Music Store still exists. Apple has just gone to some lengths to hide what was once such an important part of its business.
The iTunes Music Store took iTunes, the little music-playing app, and turned it into a way to discover new music — and to buy it, too. Today buying music a track at a time seems oddly antiquated, but back in 2003, it was a seismic change for both music buyers and for record labels.
Back in the day
Apple did not invent the playing of music on computers, and it did not invent the MP3 format that enabled it. That was invented in the ’80s by Karlheinz Brandenburg, an engineer in Germany who famously iterated his invention until it could successfully play Suzanne Vega’s a cappella track, “Tom’s Diner.”
“We had an inkling it would have repercussions,” Vega told Spin magazine in May 2010. “It both freed music and destroyed the industry.”
Up to the rise of the MP3 digital file, music had been sold in various physical media culminating in the CD. It was a good time for the record industry, especially when people would buy CD versions of vinyl albums they already had.
However, it’s fair to say that the record labels knew the real money was in physical distribution. They were very conscious that MP3 could be copied, they were seeing Napster and similar services do exactly that, but to them it seemed like online meant piracy, where physical media meant profits.
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Read the rest of this informative story here:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/04/28/music-changed-forever-with-apples-itunes-music-store-20-years-ago
William Gallagher has 30 years of experience between the BBC and AppleInsider discussing Apple technology. Outside of AppleInsider, he’s best known for writing Doctor Who radio dramas for BBC/Big Finish, and is the Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
[Thanks to Jamie Krutz for contributing this article! http://www.jamiekrutz.com]
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How the Streaming Era Turned Music Into Sludge
The launch of the iTunes Store 20 years ago laid the groundwork for platforms to transform songs into generic background noise.
By Morgan Meaker, Wired | I woke up one day last year and realized I no longer listened to music. Instead I just listened to sludge — a blur of indistinguishable songs that imitated my music taste. My sludge addiction sprang from Spotify’s algorithmically curated playlists, which promised to help me focus or find music tailored to my tastes. The app’s design was always nudging me in that direction, so I dutifully followed. It was so easy! Searching for good music takes time. But at a tap, these playlists drip-fed me endless pap that dissolved into the background. Often, it was from artists I had never heard of before and — once the playlist refreshed — would never seek out again.
At some point last year, I decided: enough. I didn’t want sludge to soundtrack my life. Instead, I launched a one-woman backlash that has so far involved resisting Spotify’s call to “discover” new music weekly, following artists I like to smaller platforms like SoundCloud, and making the drastic decision to spend $50 on a vinyl album I’d already saved on my phone.
I had been feeling pretty good about kicking my sludge habit. But then last week I listened to a clip of Ariana Grande singing the Rihanna song “Diamonds.” Only, Grande wasn’t actually singing. Her voice had been generated by AI. This is the new iteration of sludge, I realized. And that made me think about the events of 20 years ago that led us to this point, where sludge threatens to take over music streaming.
Two decades ago, two music platforms launched on an anarchic and rapidly growing internet. The first was The Pirate Bay, a torrent file-sharing site that enabled anyone to binge on music without spending a cent. The other was Apple’s iTunes Music Store—now just the iTunes Store—which celebrates its 20th anniversary next week. Compared to The Pirate Bay, hoarding music on iTunes was expensive, with most songs costing around 99 cents.
The launch of these two platforms, less than a year apart, marked a crossroads for how we consume music. The architects of each had a clear vision for music’s online future. When I talked to Peter Sunde, one of The Pirate Bay’s founders, this week, he claimed the site set out to make music available to everyone, hoping (maybe idealistically) that would give artists a bigger audience prepared to buy concert tickets or merch. Apple’s project, on the other hand, offered the music industry a way to maintain its position in the scary new world created by the internet, enriching Apple’s business while escaping the free-download mania epitomized by sites like Napster.
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Read this article related to the one above here:
https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-how-the-streaming-era-turned-music-into-sludge/
Music Changed Forever With Apple’s iTunes Music Store 20 Years Ago // How the Streaming Era Turned Music Into Sludge
