On October 23, 2001, Apple released the iPod – a portable media player that promised to overshadow the clunky design and low storage capaci...
On October 23, 2001, Apple released the iPod – a portable media player that promised to overshadow the clunky design and low storage capacity of MP3 players introduced in the mid-1990s.
The iPod boasted the ability to “hold 1,000 songs in your pocket”. Its personalised listening format revolutionised the way we consume music. And with more than 400 million units sold since its release, there is no doubt it was a success.
Yet, two decades later, the digital music landscape continues to rapidly evolve.
Market success
The iPod expanded listening beyond the constraints of the home stereo system, allowing the user to plug into not only their headphones, but also their car radio, their computer at work, or their hi-fi system at home. It made it easier to entwine these disparate spaces into a single personalised soundtrack throughout the day.
There were several preconditions that led to the iPod’s success. For one, it contributed to the end of an era in which people listened to relatively fixed music collections, such as mixtapes, or albums in their running order. The iPod (and MP3 players more generally) normalised having random collections of individual tracks.
Then during the 1990s, an MP3 encoding algorithm developed at the Fraunhofer Institute...
