But this all changed when Apple introduced the iPod Touch in 2007.īryan Bedder/Getty Image/Jamie Mccarthy/Wireimage Sitting at the back of the classroom listening to music with your friends while you were supposed to be doing math was never easier thanks to the iPod Nano – its tiny body and choice of colors meant it typically blended in with its surroundings, hiding in plain sight. That year, Apple sold 22.5 million iPods in various forms, more than quadrupling its record from 2004, itself over four times the amount shifted in 2003. More compact iterations such as the iPod Mini, Nano, and Shuffle were all released before the end of 2005. In a statement marking the iPod’s demise, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing said, “Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impact more than just the music industry – it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared.” Those two latter points defined the iPod’s next agenda, giving us even more ways to consume music. It also allowed them to digitize their bodies of work for years to come – today, for $10 USD a month we can stream anything we want, whenever want, wherever we want, in abundance. But when iTunes launched in 2001, it enabled musicians and record labels to take back control. Illicit download sites such as LimeWire, founded in 2000, kicked off a spiraling array of ways to obtain music without playing the original artist a single cent. It also welcomed a new way to find music and how we understood the overarching industry. The ability to take this many songs with you everywhere you went was quite novel as MP3s could hold 100 songs if you were lucky, expanding the constraints of listening to music on your home Hi-Fi system and transporting this experience to a humble pair of wired earphones. Despite a launch price of a then-whopping $399 USD, the iPod was well-received by the public who soon transitioned to Apple’s new music storing format. Smaller than its predecessors and capable of storing 1,000 songs – quite the revelation in 2001 – the 5GB iPod was the very first of its kind. While portable CD, cassette, and low-storage MP3 players were a thing of the ‘90s, the iPod altered the concepts of music mobility.
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