The Way We Listen to Music Changed Forever When Apple Launched iTunes in 2001

Throughout the 20th century, the dominant method of music distribution changed many times over, from live-only performances to records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3 players. But the most drastic change to the industry came on this day in January 2001, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the launch of iTunes.

People had been burning CDs onto computers for some time, but the programs they used to store these digital song files posed problems for music lovers. RealJukebox, Windows Media Player and MusicMatch all restricted fast burning and high-quality playback to paying members.

So Apple decided to release a simple, powerful and free digital music jukebox—a decision that changed music listening and the music industry forever.

ITunes wasn’t born at Apple. It was derived from a digital MP3 player, SoundJam, that was created in the late 1990s by two former Apple employees, Bill Kincaid and Jeff Robbin. After the player attracted the attention of Apple officials, they rehired Kincaid and Robbin, as well as their collaborator Dave Heller, to make similar software for its own computers. The result was iTunes, which Apple advertised as “the world’s best and easiest to use ‘jukebox’ software.”

History of iTunes

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“Apple has done what Apple does best—make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,” Jobs said in a January 9, 2001, press release. “ITunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”

ITunes’ users would be able to import and play unlimited MP3 tracks, organize their digital music collection, create custom CDs and, notably, “watch a visual representation of the music being played, which is synched to the beat of the music”—not a music video, but rather an era-appropriate, pulsing computer graphic.

Less than six months after iTunes was launched, Apple announced the program’s companion: the iPod, a handheld device that could operate iTunes from inside one’s pocket.

With the program and device in place, Apple set up the third prong of its music market takeover: selling songs. On April 28, 2003, the company launched its iTunes Music Store—an online music supermarket that let users legally purchase digital music for 99 cents a song.

Before the iTunes Store, people had to buy entire albums or abbreviated singles at a physical shop. They couldn’t buy individual digital tracks—unless they stole them. And many did. Thanks to easily burnable CDs and the proliferation of shareable MP3s, record companies lost money to digital piracy in the early aughts. As one record executive of the era told the Guardian, file sharing was “a crisis of momentous proportions” for the industry.

Jobs took advantage of the turmoil to create a pioneering collaboration, signing deals with five major record labels that allowed Apple to sell their music on iTunes. The move allowed record companies to begin making money through digital music, and it launched iTunes and the iPod into the stratosphere.

Once available on Windows computers, the iTunes Store—the first legal digital marketplace—became the most-used digital music manager in the world. In time, the store expanded its inventory to include episodes of TV shows and full-length movies, which customers watched on increasingly larger versions of the iPod. Songs eventually rose in price from 99 cents to $1.29.

ITunes no longer rules the digital music market, and iPods have morphed into smartphones. Ultimately, the program proved a gateway to streamers—music distribution services run on subscriptions—as Pandora and Spotify became its main competitors. In 2019, iTunes was absorbed into Apple’s own music streaming program, Apple Music. But the store’s legacy remains in the current shape of digital music, and the iTunes Store is still there for those wanting to purchase their favorite music piece by digital piece.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.