Apple is an interesting case. While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream, the big bucks came from adding utility and simplicity to the ubiquitous collections of 'stolen' music. A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music.
No strong opinion, but it's a somewhat unique situation in the economics of IP.
> A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music.
But they were actually filled with some legal music, prior to iTunes there wasn't really "one unified place" for purchasing digital music, most mp3's came from physical CD's people ripped privately.
A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.
> While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream
They still have impressive market shares in digital music distribution, they have started to lose ground to streaming services like Spotify and music labels finally adapting to the digital age but afaik iTunes was and still is a major player in digital music distribution.
Certainly. I wanted to provide some insight to the dynamics of the iPod/iTunes situation.
Interestingly as you noted
>A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.
I think Apples success at creating this market was a byproduct of it being fundemental pairing for the iPod's sucesss. Without the iPod, iTunes would likely have gone the same way as the rest of the early legal digital music sellers.
Without the existence of a large collection of mostly 'pirated' mp3's sitting on home desktops and office networks across the globe, the iPod probably would not have taken off.
Apple provided great utility for those collections by selling the iPod. Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.
> Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.
True enough, and you most certainly have a point about the iPod also helping, that's something I haven't really factored in that much.
To me, iTunes was mostly a great example how usability, pricing, and ease of legal access to content matters. Much earlier versions of iTunes UI was very reminiscent of mp3 sharing clients popular at that time (Limewire/Napster/Whatnot) by sorting titles in long lists and making getting them as easy as pressing a "download" button right next to it.
The choice of pricing, single songs for $.99 [0], also felt like it contributed a lot to a paradigm shift how music is sold and consumed, acknowledging established trends in priacy by allowing legitimate customers more freedom in paying for only those songs they want.
