iPod 10-Year Anniversary

Though the iPod wasn’t exactly the first of its kind; there were six MP3 players on the market before it came along. The iPod may have seemed revolutionary but it got its start in 1979. British inventor Kane Kramer created the first digital audio player, called the IXI, which was able to play about one song. Though even with his place in digital music history, he said he “can’t even bring myself to buy an iPod.”
Check out the iPod 10-Year Anniversary Playlist and get ready for 10 years worth of earworms invading your headphones

When the late Steve Jobs was handed the iPod prototype, he told his engineers it was too big. Apple’s chief executive paused and then, so the story goes, dropped the iPod in a fishtank. When Apple finally launched the iPod, 10 years ago this week, it changed how we listen to music, revolutionising the music industry and transforming Apple.

The iPod was not the first MP3 player but it was the first to get the technology so right it became a mass-market product. Rival machines were bigger and heavier or stored less music, took longer to transfer songs or had poor battery life. The iPod could store 1,000 songs, had a 10-hour battery life and enabled you to transfer lots of songs from your computer quickly. Apple decided to build a music player in early 2001, and Steve Jobs asked Jon Rubinstein, head of hardware engineering, to look into it. In January that year Apple introduced iTunes, its music program for Macs.

The only drawback was time: Jobs wanted the iPod to be available that Christmas. Rubinstein brought in Tony Fadell, an engineer who had been shopping an idea for a digital music player around Silicon Valley for some time. “If ever there was a product that catalysed Apple’s reason for being, it’s this,” Jobs said after the iPod was released.

While the competition struggled to shift music players in large numbers, only Apple seemed to understand that the key was to create a complete experience. Many hardcore Apple fans were bemused. At $399, it was too expensive, said critics; others thought the iPod lacked substance. At first, it worked only with Apple’s Mac computers, though in 2002, a Windows-compatible iPod was released. A year later came the iTunes Music Store and a Windows version of iTunes.

Sales of the iPod went through the roof," says Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer, who has been buying Apple products since the first Macintosh. Apple sold its millionth iPod in June 2003 and the two millionth six months later. Now chief executive of UK Music, the body that represents the British music industry, Sharkey says the iTunes Store took the record labels totally by surprise. Fearful of online piracy, the labels had been slow to experiment with selling their music digitally.

Apple quickly took control of the market. By the middle of the decade, the white iPod earbuds were everywhere (ironically, they were the weakest feature). Apple’s adverts were everywhere, too – dancing silhouettes against bright backgrounds, clasping their iPods – and the message was clear: your music with you, all the time.

As sales grew, so did the iPod range: an iPod Mini, a screen-free Shuffle and the iPod Touch. To date, more than 300 million iPods have been bought.
"You can see a clear evolutionary line starting with the iPod.
"It was the start of Apple becoming cool. The iMac redefined Apple but it was the iPod that connected it to something larger, to a world of rock stars and so on."

It changed the way we listen to music, too. Sharkey points out that sales of digital albums are growing.
Sales have started to fall, though, as more people carry their music on smartphones, which is why the iPod Touch is not just a music player but a games machine, web browser and communications device. Meanwhile, Apple, Google and Amazon have launched services that let you store music on internet “cloud” servers to be downloaded to whatever device you have. The iPod’s significance has waned but we haven’t lost that desire to carry our music with us.