Ten years ago I was living in Tambaram on the outskirts of Chennai. When the audio of a new film called Okkadu came out, I still vividly remember doing the rounds of all the local audio shops in the hopes of securing an audio CD or at the least an audio cassette. At that time I was aware that somewhere in phoren there is a device called the iPod. What I did not know was that Apple would launch iTunes, its digital music store, which would go onto revolutionise how we buy and consume digital content like music, TV, cinema, books and apps.
In those days, if I managed to secure an audio CD, I had the laborious option of ripping the music out of the CD and loading it onto a cheap mp3 player. Or if I had a good internet connection, I would not have even bothered with going out to buy an audio CD. I would just have downloaded the music illegally from the likes of Napster, or from any of the budding file sharing sites. Today, in whichever part of the world I am in, I just buy music at the click of a button seconds after it is released, all thanks to iTunes.
On its tenth birthday, it is difficult to fathom how important iTunes was for the birth of an organised digital world. At a time when the music industry was reeling from widespread piracy, iTunes provided users with the choice of buying music legally by making it cheap and very easy to buy. By selling single tracks for 99cents, iTunes has been the first truly popular digital music store that showed that people do indeed prefer buying stuff rather than pirating if the pricing is right, and more importantly if they are freed from all the hassle of buying a digital product.
Today iTunes is the centre piece of the Apple ecosystem used by millions of people around the world. Launched with a meagre catalogue of 200,000 songs available only for Mac users, iTunes grew up in these 10 years to be the world’s biggest music store with a 26 million song catalogue. But the real legacy of iTunes is not in being the first or the biggest music store. It is not even in that it was one of the biggest factors behind the success of the iPod, and consequently the iPhone and the iPad. The real legacy of iTunes is in introducing people to the idea of buying content online. The real legacy is in convincing users to store their credit card information on a company’s servers, so they need not enter that information every time they want to buy a song. This legacy is what has helped Apple when it launched its video service, selling and renting TV shows and movies. This legacy has helped with the launch of the app store, which introduced us to the idea of buying software and games at the touch of a button. In fact the app store would play such a pivotal role in the smartphone and tablet revolutions that those companies with good app stores like Google would flourish, and those with mediocre ones like BlackBerry flounder.
iTunes and the music industry are at the cusp of a new era with the growing popularity of music streaming services. If iTunes is able to adopt that change we may yet see new models of distribution in all our digital content. Apps on demand, anyone?
The writer is a tech geek.
articles@theadarsh.net