COM 565 Blog

With the introduction of iTunes music has never been the same. The music world completely changed over night. Apple turned the music world on its ear and left it with three major problems. First iTunes opened up a new way to buy music. Before iTunes music was bought in music stores or through a few mail order music houses. You would go to music stores and sift through music bins with headlines and dig through the not so popular music titles, music store clerks usually would come in two flavors, those who didn't know music and those that where audio files.

Music stores where cool in the day, but somewhat limiting which brings me to the second reason iTunes took the music industry by storm. Finding music was somewhat of a hunt, you could talk with friends or listen to the radio and sample a new song of a bands album, but the radio stations played only the hit songs recommended by the music industry. Sure there were alternative stations playing the underground stuff but it wasn’t the norm. iTunes made it possible to buy music based on preference and recommendations. This was allowed users to make playlists of music that was a person as the music they were listening to and share with friends.

The third change iTunes delivered to the music world was purchase only the song you want for 99 cents. This was different than anything the music world has ever seen. The music world had 45 albums with one or two songs, but iTunes developed the concept of digital content in a music form. Apple really delivered a double blow when they introduced the iPod. What Apple really did was introduce a complete digital ecosystem. iTunes stored MP3 and iPods made MP3 portable and cool.

The music industry took massive losses as music listeners began converting music collections to mp3 and building and sharing playlist. After a time the music industry soon started to intact laws to constrict the control iTunes gave the world.