The Creation of iTunes

was going to officially sunset the venerable iTunes program. In its place will be three Mac desktop apps that are pretty similar to what you can find on iOS devices Apple mobile devices. In other words, So today I thought it might be fun to trace the history of iTunes, how it came to be, how it changed the music industry and helped create the business I'm in, which is podcasting in case you haven't caught on yet, and why

Apple decided to finally say goodbye. We'll also explore how people felt about iTunes, because it's not all sunshine and roses, particularly if you ever had to deal with the Windows based version of the program. Oh and before I go any further, I should mention that when Apple talked about ending iTunes, they were really just talking about Max at the time of this recording, the company hasn't said anything

about what it's planning for the PC version. PC mag reported that there's no immediate plan for it to disappear from Windows. So there's that, okay, so iTunes. Let's talk about the program and where Apple was when it was first announced back in two thousand one, because it was a very different company from the one we're used to today. In fact, it really behooves us to look over Apple's history leading up to that moment, because the company had was, let's call it, it was in a transition, to put

it gently, so really had been through an existential crisis. Arguably, the crisis began when Steve Jobs inserted himself into the development process of various products like the Macintosh line of computers, and then complicated a process and alienated many over at Apple in the same go, and this eventually precipitated in his being fired, or at the very least, he was pushed aside so far away that he would leave the company in nineteen Steve Wozniak, the other co founder of Apple,

also left the company around that time, though he had sort of stepped back quite a bit already after surviving a plane crash in nine. Over the next few years, lots of things would change at Apple. John Scully, who was the guy who came over to Apple from Pepsi and had served as the president of the company. He was also of the man who was responsible for pushing out Steve Jobs, would become chairman of Apple in nine

Michael Spindler would become the CEO. Then just a few months later, Scully resigned his position as chairman and he was replaced by Mike Markula. Markula, in turn, would step down just a couple of years later. Gil Emilio would become chairman and CEO of Apple in nine six. By

this point Apple was struggling. Son Microsystems had offered to acquire the company, but Emilio turned down that proposal, and you could call that a great decision, But Emilio also made some questionable choices, such as allowing other companies to sell macclone computers by running Mac operating System software on non Apple computers. This gave other companies the opportunity to sell computers running Mac operating System at a lower price

than what Apple was charging. And making matters worse was that Microsoft had real least Windows, which was a significant update to the Windows platform, while the Mac operating system was looking more than a little dated at the time. Emilia was also unhappy with the progress or lack thereof, on the next version of the Mac operating system, code

named Copeland. In an effort to solve that problem, Emilio led the charge for Apple to acquire a company called Next in e x T. That company happened to be the brainchild of one Steve Jobs, who founded Next after leaving Apple in the nineteen eighties, and that set the scene for Jobs to become the next CEO of Apple. He first served as an advisor to the company, but he began maneuvering with the board of directors in an

effort to become chairman again. Emilio eventually left the company after butting heads with Steve Jobs, though to be fair, Emilio was also at the helm during the worst financial quarter in Apple's history. June seven was the final day of that horrible quarter in which Apple lost fifty six million dollars. So just let that sink in and just three months the company lost more than fifty million bucks. No wonder many people predicted that Apple was not long

for this world. Steve Jobs was named by the board as the interim CEO. He would actually refer to his own title as I CEO. Cute, right, but it was serious. Business Analysts predicted that Apple was about three months away from bankruptcy when Jobs took over, so he had a huge hurdle to overcome, and he made some really big changes. Some were seen as cute, like the iMac. Some were seen as the deepest of betrayals, like when Apple and Microsoft announced a partnership in a five year agreement to

have office software come over to the Mac. And while not all his decisions were lauded by the Apple faithful, he did get the ship turning around. At the Macworld conference in he announced that Apple had ended the first quarter of ninety eight with a forty five million dollar profit. By the end of that year, the company had earned

three hundred nine million dollars in two thousand. Steve Jobs made the transition from interim CEO to honest the Goodness CEO and behind the scenes at Apple, where it was progressing on a trio of big projects that would transform the company. One of them was the OS ten operating system, which is still the basis of Mac operating systems today, one was iTunes and one that would come out a little bit after the other two was the iPod. Now keep in mind, at this stage Apple had not yet

fully re established itself. Steve Jobs could still fill a room for a press conference, but this was years before Apple would wow crowds with the iPhone or surprise skeptics like me with the iPad. Apple the company was still on uncertain footing, though it had been an upward trajectory after nearly falling apart in the late nineteen nineties. One thing Jobs new to do was to pay attention to

emerging trends. One of those trends that was just starting to gain traction involved the MP three audio compression format. Early adopters were starting to rip music from CDs to their computers, and a couple of companies had created portable MP three players, the digital equivalent of a Sony Walkman cassette player, but one that could hold a library's worth

of music. And a couple of former Apple employees named Bill Kincaid and Jeff Robin had created an interesting program that could turn a computer into a digital jukebox, specifically a Mac computer. Now, both Kincaid and Robin had worked on Copeland, that Mac operating system version that Emilio had discarded in favor of the next platform from Steve Jobs.

Once the decision was made to ditch the work they had done on Opland, both Kincaid and Robin had left Apple and they went on to pursue work at different companies. They were separated and working on individual opportunities. Now, the origins of what would become iTunes should be pretty relatable to anyone out there. One day, Bill Kincaid was driving up to a race track to practice driving his race

car at super high speeds. I mean, we've all been there, right Anyway, he was listening to NPR when he heard a bit about the Diamond Rio MP three player. Kincaid wrote that this was actually the first time he had even heard of the MP three file format, which is kind of interesting because it was definitely in the news because of file sharing. But I'll get into that more

than a bit. Toward the end of the report on NPR, the person on the radio said something like it won't work with Max, and Kincaid, being a former Apple employee, thought he could do something about that, and he ended up in listing his former co worker Robin in the effort. So Kincaid built the back end of the program and enlisted Jeff Robin to work on the front end, the user interface side, and the result was software called sound jam MP and it worked on Max and it was

interoperable with the Diamond Rio MP three player. Jobs somehow heard about this software and was impressed with the work done by the former Apple employees, so he had Apple purchase the application. They also hired Kincaid and Robin to come back into the fold at Apple, and Robin, by the way, was in charge of iTunes all the way up to its dissolution. Kincaid and Robin joined a team that took sound jam MP and they began to transform

it into something new, something belonging to Apple. And this leads us up to January nine, two thousand one, when Steve Jobs took the stage at the back World conference. He started off talking out O S ten and he moved on to talk about hardware for a while, and about an hour into the presentation, somewhere around fifty five minutes, he segued over to talking about music. Now, this was months before the company would reveal the iPod that was

still a secret. So at this stage, Jobs was talking about the process of taking music CDs and ripping the music to your computer. Jobs talked about stuff that I think we all take for granted these days. He talked about the opportunity to take a music collection, rip it to a hard drive, and then create playlists from that music.

You can mix and match anything you like. You could have a playlist with two songs from the New York Dolls, three from Iggy Pop, half a dozen from David Bowie, four from the Talking Heads, and gosh, I'd really like to listen to a playlist like that. Anyway. You can make the digital equivalent of an old mix tape on cassette, or you could turn your computer into a digital jukebox, but unlike a cassette, you could reorder those songs any way you liked, any time you liked. You would never

be stuck in one particular configuration. The beauty of having your music in a digital format is that you have tons of options, so you can shift things around, or even listen to your entire music library on shuffle, so that you never have the same listening experience twice in

a row. Beyond that, you could use the program to burn your playlist to a c D. Now, in this case, you'd be stuck with whatever order you decided upon when you made the CD, unless you were using a rewriteable c D, in which case you could wipe it and start again. But back in those days, burning a c D could take several minutes, and most of us didn't have the patients to do it again if we realized

we had fudged the order of the songs. Jobs then went on to talk about portable MP three players, again without hinting that Apple was making one of their own. He talked about how it was necessary to have software on a computer that could interface with m P three players to transfer music from computer to player. This was necessary because back in those days, MP three players required

a wired connection to synchronize with a host computer. There really were no WiFi MP three players in the early days, so you had to pair your MP three player with a computer using a cable. I know, it's like the Stone Age, right. Steve Jobs finished his introduction before actually unveiling iTunes, by talking about internet radio stations. These were pretty young in two thousand one, but we're growing in popularity.

Audio compression had allowed stations to stream radio over the Internet, giving them the ability to reach many more listeners than terrestrial radio, particularly for radio stations that had lower powered transmitters. Now this leads us up to the actual introduction of iTunes, which I'll talk about in just a moment after we take this quick break. Now, I know all those features are news to us today. It's been nearly twenty years

since Steve Jobs gave that presentation. And let's be fair, iTunes would not be the first program to help people organize a digital music library. There were others that already existed, but Apple always had a certain style to it, and Apple designers are genuinely really good at what they do and typically create intuitive, powerful interfaces. So it wasn't just that iTunes could do these things. It's that it could do those things and look good at the same time.

It was easy to understand. It wasn't so cluttered or complex as others, and Jobs took opportunity to really hammer home how iTunes, unlike most of the popular digital music applications that were on the market, already, was much easier to use and to understand. He contrasted iTunes with other media software. He criticized how the competition made everything to cluttered and confusing. He said that companies just had confused

options with operability. Jobs also said that the competition put in arbitrary restrictions in their programs in an effort to convince users to upgrade to the paid version of those programs. He said that the software would throttle the ripping and burning speeds for CDs, as well as use lower quality settings to encode music into MP three files. So yeah, you could download one of these applications and it technically would work, but it would purposefully hinder itself and give

you a substandard experience. And this was all done in an effort to upsell the user to a pro version of that software, which would remove those restrictions, so said Jobs, these companies weren't offering an improved piece of software for a premium. Rather, they had purposefully downgraded their software's capabilities to create the incentive for people to cough up cash for the full version. It seems like a backwards way

to go about it now. In a demonstration, Jobs ripped love Shack off, an album by the B fifty two, so you know, good choice. He explained that the program that his iTunes would read the data off the c D, then searched the c D database and retrieved the track titles to match with the actual tracks, because that information was not encoded on the compact discs themselves. And then it would allow you to listen directly from the CD,

or you could rip it to the computer. Jobs showed off how the user could build a music library and browsed through that library and play stuff easily. Interestingly, he'd include a few examples by the Beatles. I say interestingly because it would take a long time before the Beatles discography made its way to Apple. But this is before the iTunes store. Anyway, there was no way to buy music on iTunes at this point. It was all about ripping music off c d s, So at the stage

iTunes was really only a music management application. So iTunes debuted in two thousand one as a way to build and organize a music library, and there was no music story yet. To put songs on iTunes, you would either do one of two things. You would rip songs off a c D or you would use some other means to get the music files. So that could include peer to peer sharing networks where you are technically pirating music that would become a big part of jobs is discussion.

What's the iTunes music store would debut a couple of years later. Now you could use iTunes to port songs over to an MP three player, and you could use it to listen to internet radio stations, and you could use it to burn your own CDs. But that was about it. Oh, except the one more thing. Apple included an option to run a graphics application that would create trippy visuals as you listen to music, sort of a

kaleidoscope effect as you're listening. And then they played about two thirds of love Shack So as a Georgia native and B fifty twos or from Georgia, I approve of that music choice, but at that point they should have just played the whole darn song. I mean, if you're gonna play that much, might as well let it go

all the way through. Jobs boasted that iTunes wouldn't brattle c D speeds, it would allow users to encode MP three files at a higher quality than competitors were allowing, and most importantly, it would be free to download for Mac users. The tagline for iTunes was rip mix burn, and Jobs announced that it was available right then and there for any Mac running OS nine, and the crowd

went banana. A week after the presentation, Apple reported that the iTunes software had been downloaded two hundred seventy five thousand times. Remember it was only available for the Mac computers at that time, Matt computers running OS nine for that matter, and the Mac had a very small market share, so topping a quarter of a million downloads in a week was actually pretty ppressive. Apple gave a quick update a few months later in March two thousand one, with

iTunes one point one. The major part of that update was making iTunes compatible with Mac OS ten systems. Now skip ahead ten months. Steve Jobs appeared at a special Apple Music event. He took a different approach at this event and talked about value see The first version of iTunes would burn CDs as normal music CDs, not as MP three c ds. A normal c D can hold a little more than an hour's worth of audio, and m P three CD can hold more than one hundred songs as data, but it could only be read by

special CD players with MP three capability. Those were slowly becoming more prevalent, including in vehicles, so it was something that was worthwhile, and then you had MP three player options, the newest of which would be the iPod. Jobs talked about how the iPod would hold a thousand songs on it while fitting in your pocket. Again, it's old news to us, but at the time it was a sweet sales pitch. Never mind that other MP three players had

been on the market for quite some while. Jobs had even alluded to them back in the initial iTunes announcement. And this isn't an episode about the iPod, so I'm not going to dwell on it for too long. But at that same event, Jobs announced some updates to the iTunes software. Now iTunes two point oh could burn MP three files to CDs rather than creating a new audio CD, and that would allow users to put way more songs

on a single disc. As long as they had a player capable of reading MP three files, they'd be good to go. Apple added a couple of other options to iTunes at that stage as well, namely cross fading and an equalizer. While Steve Jobs was setting things in motion to blast Apple off into the stratosphere, iTunes continued to evolve. When i Tunes three released in July two thousand two,

it was with a few new features. Now, users could assigned songs of star rating, which allowed them to sort their music library by how much they liked particular songs. So if you wanted to just listen to songs you really loved, you could choose the max rating and include all those other, you know, songs that you had said were fantastic, and exclude all the ones that you know

aren't really your groove at that moment. Notably, that was a feature supported in an earlier digital media player application,

a different one one called Audion. Now. According to Cable Sasser, who was co creator of Audion, he had met with Steve Jobs and had a back and forth about the differences between iTunes and sound Jam and the Audion digital media player, and he had pointed out how Audion had some features that iTunes did not, which would give their software a chance in the market against the giant tunes.

Jobs actually pointed out that the version of iTunes that Sasser was talking about was just version one point oh, and that subsequent versions would add features features like the ones Audience had. Sasser also said that he found out Apple had allegedly originally intended on purchasing Audion and turning Audion into iTunes, and that sound Jam was technically Apple's second choice, but Audion at the time was in negotiations with a different company and it kind of put Apple

on hold and the opportunity passed them by. And on a side note, today Audion is no more. It was actually discontinued in two thousand four. And whether this was another example of one of Steve jobs favorite quotes frequently attributed to Pablo Picasso that being good artists borrow, great artists steal, That's beyond my knowledge, but it does seem plausible that Apple might have taken some inspiration from Audion after having that meeting in two thousand one. Another new

feature in iTunes three was the introduction of smart playlists. Essentially, a smart playlist allowed iTunes users to set certain rules that the program would follow moving forward in order to automatically create playlists. So let's say you're a big fan of the band The shut Ups. You have a playlist of all their songs, and you could just keep adding to that playlist as new albums come out from The

shut Ups. But with smart playlists, you could set up a rule so that every time you added new songs to your library from the shut ups, those songs would automatically get added onto that particular playlist. iTunes also had a play count for songs added in iTunes three, so you could create a playlist of the songs you listen to the most frequently. That list would change dynamically the

more you used iTunes to listen to stuff. So maybe one month you find and you're just really fixated on the classic song Come a little Bit Closer by J and the Americans, and because you've listened to it a billion times, it pops up on your most played playlist. But over time you get out of this whole fixation on the song, and eventually it gets swapped out for some other song that now you are totally focused on.

iTunes three also added a feature called sound check. The purpose of sound check is to act as a sort of level izer for volume. And maybe you've experienced this kind of thing where you're listening to digital music and one song it's pretty quiet, so you're turning the volume way up so you can hear it properly, and then the next one comes on and it's way too loud.

It's blasting your ear drums. To minimize that kind of experience, sound check would attempt to bring the volume of different songs closer together to the same level to avoid a jarring experience. One last thing that iTunes three added was support for audible dot Com audio books. Back then, audible dot Com was its own standalone company. It would actually be a few more years before Amazon would acquire it now. I add this because I imagine Apple and Amazon are

kind of competitive with each other on most occasions. Audible dot Com is known for audiobooks, and this would also help pave the way for a future form of media to emerge the podcast. While iTunes three added in some features that increased the digital jukebox programs functionality, it would be the fourth version of iTunes that would really bring it along with a component that would have a massive

impact on the entertainment industry. In April two thousand three, Apple unveiled iTunes for which included a little thing called the iTunes Store. The music business would never be the same again. At the two thousand three Apple Music event, Steve Jobs took the stage to talk about the new changes to iTunes. He talked about how iTunes would now support advanced audio coding or a sea files, which is an audio compression format similar to m P three's but

with generally better sound quality. And then he talked about the iTunes store and how Apple was going to change the way we acquire music, which I'll talk about more in just a second after we take this quick break. Upon the initial release of iTunes and up through two three, Apple's official line was that you would add music to iTunes by ripping tracks off of c d s you had purchased. But even in two thousand one, when iTunes

first debuted, that was really being pretty coy. Back in the late nineties, services like Napster allowed users to share and download files, including ripped audio tracks. All you needed was the Napster software and an Internet connection, and you can start pulling music off the Internet to add to your own personal library for free. The greatest fears of the music industry were realized. People had the chance to pirate music to their hearts content, and lots of people

really went hog wild with that concept. The music industry struck back, and Napster itself was first shut down in two thousand one, but the cat was out of the bag. There were numerous other services that were doing effectively the same thing, and people were rapidly acquiring massive libraries of music because it seemed like everything was available all the time always, But argued Jobs, what if buying music online

was really easy. One of the reasons piracy existed, he argued, is that buying music online was really a non option. There was no legal way of doing it, and the few places where you could get a digital track made it a real hassle. You had existing services like Rhapsody, but they required a subscription, so you couldn't just pop on to buy the tracks you wanted, and there was no guarantee you'd be allowed to download the track you

liked in the first place. Another similar service was called press Play, and that was another subscription service, and you could download songs from press Play and from Rhapsody, but they would require you to spend an extra amount on top of your subscription fee in order to download a track, and Jobs pointed out, at least with press Play, if you let your subscription lapse, you would no longer be

able to play your downloaded music. There was drm attached to it, so that only if your subscription was current would you be able to listen to the music you had downloaded to your machine. You would have files on your computer you would not be able to access, your library would be locked off from you. No one out there was big enough to create the sort of marketplace where major labels could strike deals to have their catalogs

available for purchase and download. No one was offering the software for free without the need for any sort of subscription, and no one was giving users the free they wanted to download songs and play them where and when they wanted to, and that ended up being the pitch for the iTunes Music store. On a side note, one of the most interesting things about this two thousand three presentation, which you can find on YouTube, by the way, is that Jobs takes time to dismiss the idea of subscription

services for music streaming. He pointed out that for decades, the model for consumers was to go out and buy music, either on LP albums, cassette tapes, c D s, singles, or whatever. He argued that this would become an intrinsic part of how we as consumers relate to music. Were used to owning copies of it, and therefore the subscription model opposed how we preferred to interact with music now.

I just wanted to mention this that because today we are back to a lot of subscription based services, that's the new prevalent model out there, many of which have an ad supported free tier and a paid for ad free experience. And it's interesting that the environment Jobs was dismissing in two thousand three is now the reality in two thousand nineteen. And that's not to say I think that Jobs was wrong when he said that. I think for the time he was absolutely right, and the success

of iTunes is evidence supporting that stance. But things would change over time. All right back to iTunes, Jobs laid out how establishing the iTunes store was actually a pretty tough endeavor. To make it happen, Apple had to meet with what we're known as the Big Five. These were the five big music labels that represented nearly the entire

music publishing industry outside of some small independent operations. He also mentioned that at the time, tech companies and publishing companies weren't the best of friends, largely because of the piracy issues I just mentioned. Jobs laid the terms of the agreement that applied to users. At the time of launch, the music store had two hundred thousand tracks. Users would be allowed to burn an unlimited number of c ds

of their music libraries, provided the CDs were for personal use. Now, I'm not going to pat the music industry on the back for this, since in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in lots of other places, it has long been established that it's perfectly legal to create a backup copy of a copyrighted work if it is for your personal use, even if in the process of making the backup you are transforming the way the copyrighted work

is stored. So, for example, if you have a bunch of audio CDs, ripping those audio CDs to convert them into m P three's is perfectly legal if it's for personal use as a backup. But hey, it's so nice

that the labels agreed to abide by the rules. As a concession to the music industry, Apple did put in a governor in iTunes to prevent it from being used to burn unlimited copies of the same set of songs on two c D s. You could burn the same playlist two c D ten times, but if you wanted to do it an eleventh time, you would have to

change the playlist. In some way, you couldn't have the exact same playlist burned on c D after c D, and that would in theory stop people from using iTunes to produce bootleg copies of albums, though you could just as easily get a CD reader and a CD burner, produce one CD using iTunes, and then churn out the copies using the reader and burner that bypass iTunes altogether, but that's a step that most people wouldn't really be

aware of or willing to take. Similarly, the agreement allowed users to put their music on an unlimited number of iPods. This future proofed music libraries. You didn't have to worry about the new iPod coming out, but your license to put your library on there had expired or was no longer applicable or something. JOBS also introduced the concept of authorizing machines to play music libraries with iTunes. For you can load your iTunes library on up to three Mac computers.

You download to one computer, then you can burn files to c D and transfer them to the other two if they were bought from the iTunes Music store, but you would be limited to those three Mac computers. If you've got a new computer and you wanted to move your library to the new one, you'd first have to de authorize one of the three max already hosting those tunes on your library. Jobs also revealed that songs would sell for nine nine cents each and there'd be no

subscription fee on top of that. This was actually one of the toughest battles Jobs had to fight with the music labels, who collectively were worried that by allowing people to buy songs all a cart the process would kill off the concept of the record album, and record albums

were the foundation for the recorded music industry. See, people would have to buy entire albums in order to get two or three songs that they really wanted, and an album could cost fifteen or twenty dollars, so the music industry was raking in cash, and it didn't even have to worry about making every track on an album a hit, because really you just needed one or two to sell

the albums in the first place. You can understand why the industry would resist the move to selling songs a la carte the same way you could understand why music lovers really wanted that option. Jobs was able to convince the record labels that offering up the option to buy songs individually would not be the end of the world, in part because of the limitations Apple seemed to face at the time during these negotiations. iTunes was not yet

available on Windows PCs. The Macintosh had its devoted followers, but they represented a very small percentage of the overall computer market. Less than ten of all computers were Mac computers, So, in other words, Apple's impact would be so small that even if people did by single songs, and even if they did issue albums they decided the albums are no longer relevant, the music labels probably wouldn't even notice. It

was too small of a group of people. Besides, file sharing had already meant that people were downloading music song by song, so at least with Apple's method, the labels could make some money off of it. Another nod to the concerns of the music industry was in the use of digital rights management or d r M on the music files from the iTunes store, which locked the music onto Apple devices or computers running iTunes. Kind of talked

about that with the d authorizing. Whether Jobs was in favor of this at the time or not, I don't know, but I do know that over time he spoke out against DRM, saying the strategy ultimately hurt the legitimate consumer and that it shouldn't be used. But at the time Apple was kind of in a place where it had to agree to it, even if if Jobs didn't really like it, And honestly, I don't know if that time

if Jobs had formed that opinion. Yet the songs in the iTunes store were in a a C format encoded at all bits per second, giving what Jobs claimed was a sound quality to rival that of actual audio CDs. He revealed that every song would have a free thirty second preview so users can make sure that the song they were buying was the one they actually wanted in the first place, and every song would have album cover art to come along with it, no longer making a

digital song library just a list of file names. The crowd at the event was receptive to Jobs as announcement, and he didn't really go into the business side on the back end. He didn't talk about how much money Apple would make off every sale. Generally speaking, the figure most people cite in that regard is that Apple would take about thirty cents off every sale. The rest would go to the artist, or more likely to the music label that then would pay out a portion to the artist.

Thirty cents a pop is pretty small, but Apple was able to do the old cliche of making it up in volume. Sure, a single purchase would net the company three shiny dimes, but in mass, the company was looking at millions and later on billions of dollars in revenue. In fact, according to Apple, people bought more than a million songs in the first week of the iTunes music

store going live. The company also stated that more than half of those songs purchased were in the form of album purchases, which helped allay the fears that iTunes was going to render the concept of albums completely moot. And, perhaps more impressively, Apple announced that more than half of the two thousand songs that initially made available had been purchased at least once, making three hundred grand within one week of launching a brand new online store is pretty sweet.

But it got better for Apple because the company also saw a big jump in iPod sales. So Apple had just introduced the third generation I Pod and it was a hot commodity. Now Apple was making money both off the hardware side and the service side of digital music. Apple had launched the store in April two thousand three and updated it in October of that year, adding some features like the option to buy online gift certificates for family and friends, and also an allowance feature that let

users create sort of a music bank account. They could put money into this allowance and that would help them budget their entertainment purchases. So they'd say, all right, well, I'm gonna put ten bucks aside, and that's all I can use this month. So I'm gonna put that in my allowance, and once that's gone, I have to wait until the following month before I put another ten dollars in there. It was kind of a way to control purchases. Oh and it was also in that update that iTunes

would finally come out to the Windows PC market. Now, as someone who got iTunes around that time for a Windows PC, I can tell you that the effortless experience enjoyed by the Mac users wasn't quite the same one I had when I used iTunes, which felt like a sluggish behemoth on my Windows machine. But we'll chat more about the differences in the next episode. Apple was able to get the music labels on board with this move to Windows, largely because Jobs had user data to support

his argument. The labels saw that people were eager to purchase music online if it was an easy experience. They didn't have to worry about downloading a corrupted file or, worse yet, accidentally getting a hold of malware when they were trying to download a song. They also knew that the quality of the recording would meet their expectations because it was all coming from Apple and the users hadn't

ditched the concept of purchasing albums. So iTunes had made itself a home over on Windows machines with the blessing of the music labels, and it was a license to print money. By the end of the year, the iTunes music store reportedly sold more than seventy million songs. That's a lot of music. Many factor contributed to Apple's phenomenal growth in the two thousand's, but I don't think it's hyperbole to say that iTunes contributed an enormous amount to

the financial success of the company. It certainly would prove to be a powerhouse in the years to come. By two thousand four, the music store contributed to two hundred seventy eight million dollars in revenue from quote other music products end quote, according to Apple's annual financial report. Now, that category wasn't just iTunes Music Store, It also included iPod accessories. The iPod itself was separated from that category

as well as iPod related services. Now, just to peek into our crystal ball for a second, on the tenth anniversary of the music store launching, that would be in two thousand thirteen, analyst Horace, did you estimated that the

store generated revenue in excess of twelve billion dollars. Now, I'll put that into perspective Apple the company, the whole company reported a total revenue of eight billion dollars in two thousand four, So a decade after launching, the iTunes Music store was generating far more revenue than the entire

company had managed during its launch period. But we've got some more stuff to talk about between the years two thousand four and two thousand and thirteen, So join me for the next episode where we'll continue the iTunes story and how the program grew, and maybe even talk about why it grew beyond all reason before it finally met its end in the summer of twenty nineteen. But this

wraps up this episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes, whether it's a company, a specific technology, a person in tech, or any other technologically oriented topic, sent me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop on by our website that's tech stuff podcast

dot com. You'll find in our kind of all of our episodes over there, plus links to our social media presence and a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.