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How iPods Took Over the World
An anonymous reader writes "The Observer has a piece today about the iPod's ascension to dominance of the mp3 player market. The author argues that it's largely the result of clever business tactics and the iTunes music store." From the article: "The second thing about the iPod: it puts you, not them, in control. Basically, the record labels are devotees of the Henry Ford business model: 'You can have any music you want so long as it's what I want to give you.' But using the cyberspace jukebox, you're no longer at their mercy. You don't have to pay for the four filler tracks on every album. You don't have to buy albums at all. You can put country next to classical, punk next to jazz, Barry Manilow next to Placido Domingo (wait, that's a joke)."
Because, of course, you can only put songs from the iTunes Music Store on an iPod, right? Even though the iPod was released before the iTMS... iTunes defaults to ripping tracks as un-DRMed AACs which you can play anywhere you can play an AAC. Or you can rip to MP3 or WAV or AIFF. And you can import all those into iTunes without any DRM going on them either. If you don't want to buy from the iTunes Music Store, guess what? You don't have to!
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
The iPod was already taking over the market before iTMS came along. It certainly helped them ramp up sales over the last few years, but the real reason the iPod became so popular was because of the one thing that Apple is known for getting right most of the time: Interface simplicity.
Remember what most MP3 players looked like before the iPod? I'm not just talking about the general ugliness of some of them, but the way the interface was designed specifically to appeal to people who LOVE high-tech gagetry, and think the Windows file manager is downright spiffy.
No non-geek had any clue at all how to operate them, or even what they were for. They just barely knew that "EM PEE THREE" had something to do with music, because their nephew set them up with Napster back around 1999 so they could steal music online and listen to it at the office.
Then the iPod comes out. It's not an "MP3 Player", it's a music player. It has simple and obvious controls. It's easy to figure out how to get songs into it, and easy to figure out how to play them when they are there.
What iTMS is doing is ensuring that the iPod *keeps* it's lead in the market. It's also creating a new revenue source for Apple. (They started it off as a possible loss-leader to sell iPods, but it's turning a profit these days, and with the addition of video downloads, I'm betting it will become an even bigger revenue generator for them. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay two bucks for a low-res TV show episode, but it appears that some people are happy to do so. Go figure.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It's the most user-friendly mp3 player with the best interface, and excellent software syncing. Oh to all you non-conformists herescreaming that it was "T3H MARKETING!!!", Apple used to use exactly the same kinds of adverts for the macintosh, that doesn't exactly have a huge market share.
I'm starting to feel like the only person on earth who doesn't like Ipods. I admit they are well designed, they have a great user interface. They're very functional. From my point of view there's just one thing wrong with them. The built-in rechargable power supply. I use my MP3 player in a lot of outdoor activities. I prefer a device that I can either replace the battery or take one or more spares with me. You can't do that with an Ipod. Instead, I have a small Sandisk MP3 player which takes on AAA battery. When travelling I can get replacement batteries anywhere. When hiking or biking I can take a spare rechargable AAA. When camping, I can bring several. The design and UI are nowhere near as nice, but that's trumped (at least for me) by the portability.
[Insert pithy quote here]
If I can get all the same news that Digg has and more from Slashdot, then why should I even care about Digg?
You just don't get it, Apple has succeeded because they have what those enterprise software salesdroids call a "solution."
;)
The iPod was popular on it's own at first because it was _simple_ and easy to use, their initial apps for it IMHO sucked miserably. But the iPod integrated with your already existing music library, and syncing everything up was very, very easy.
Now add a couple years, you can choose from a couple different models, all using the same easy to use interface, it still interfaces nicely with iTunes, which runs on Mac/Windows which can rip and organize all your CDs, and sync with your iPod, and hot dog! Now you can buy music straight from withini the same application that you already keep all your music in to begin with!
Don't fool yourself, marketing was a vital role, but don't underscore the brillant move by apple to bring all these music services into iTunes+iPod, because without the whole package you just have something that's smaller than the Nomad Jukebox, lame.
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Try 10. I had almost completely stopped buying albums two years before Napster came around because I was sick of having to fork over $20+ CDN for a CD that only had 2 or 3 good tracks.
Already, the slashdot posts are rolling in - "People only buy iPods due to marekting" Perhaps the lack of insight evidenced by these comments is why other player manufacturers are unable to compete. The iPod is successful partly due to marketing, but also because it Just Works for the average user. People don't care about Ogg Vorbis. People don't care about DRM if they don't notice it (and if you use an iPod along with iTunes and regular CDs, you realistically don't unless you're trying to give songs to your friends). Couple that with solid industrial design (and industrial design addresses not just looks, but human factors/ergonomics), and you have a winner. For some reason, all other players fail on one count or another. A successful company understands its customer - and Apple recognizes that its customer is not a typical Slashdotter. They instead choose to target the other 99.9% of the market.
I'd recommend amaroK if you use KDE, or Rhythmbox or gnupod if you use gnome. Banshee also handles ipods pretty well.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
iPods are also reaching a saturation point. Everybody I know either has an iPod or something else to listen to MP3's for. And once everybody has one, it loses the "cool" factor.
Actually no, it still has its cool factor but nobody is going to "play" with yours because they already have one. It's now just a "keeping up with the Joneses" type of phenomenon. I don't have one because I hate Apple and don't like getting something jsut because everyone else has it.
PSP is too expensive and too niche-ey to become really mainstream. And the fact that Sony sucks at marketing because they won't share any formats. All the people in the know like slashdoters know that in the long run the DRM stuff and format issues become a pain in the ass.
When are PVP's going to become the thing to have? Archos AV500?
but I wish articles would stop making articles about ipods then spending most of the time talking about itunes.
There's something to be said of albums that are meant to be taken as one whole work of art. There aren't any really horrible songs or filler, and each song just kinda flows or leads into the next. Some of my favorite examples:
- Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon
- Nirvana's Nevermind
- Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here
- Soundgarden's Superunknown
- Michael Jackson's Thriller (despite that horrible duet with Paul McCartney)
Whenever I hear a song from one of these albums on the radio, I'm always waiting for the following track to start playing at the end. It's so unsettling to hear them out of context. It's like seeing a drawing of Spider-Man floating on a page with no background, rather than in a comic book with a plot and setting. I'm sure every classic rock fan has encountered that one jackass DJ who plays Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" and not "Livin' Lovin' Maid" afterwards.
I don't think the situation will get better for we who enjoy music's artistic merits. Radio and MTV (or MuchMusic) already can't tolerate any songs longer than about 4 minutes. I feel this "iPod effect" will only cause record labels to enourage their artists to record music that is marketable rather than good (more so than they do already).
I dunno, maybe I'm in the minority, but I've actually NEVER heard anyone say "I bought my iPod so I can finally buy music from iTunes!!"
People buy the iPod because it's attractive, has a large harddrive (one of the first players to use a harddrive, I think), and has a great interface (circular touchpad) for browsing the contents. And, no doubt, because the marketing has been successful in making it the first thing that comes to mind when people think about MP3 players. Frankly, there may be other players on the market that do as good a job or better, but when it comes down to it the iPod is just a good little piece of hardware that does what it does very well. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why it's popular.
Personally I haven't bought one because I want something that can record a line-in signal. And because I have, like, no money at all right now. I might eventually get an iRiver or something that can record CD-quality music.
However, I'm almost sure that iTunes is never the reason why people by the iPod..
Of course, I could be wrong.
I'm surprised it was marked as insightful. He didn't share any "insights" that have not been brought up on every single Slashdot discussion of the iPod ever. If anything, it should probably be marked "Redundant."
But yeah, it shouldn't have been marked as a "Troll" either. The population of slashdot has changed to the point that there are a lot of people with mod points who don't actually seem to know what a troll is anymore. C'est La Vie.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
C'mon . . . lots of folks have an iPod and have never purchased a single song from the iTunes store. The reason iPod was so successful was that it was the first portable music player with mainstream appeal which let folks play non-DRM'd music on it. If we would have been forced to re-encode our stuff (a la Sony) people would have never touched it, and Apple knew this. (Sony probably knew that too, but their label / content arm wouldn't stand for DRM-free players) The other part of mainstream appeal is the iTunes software -- highly intuitive for non-geeks, extremely fast, no forced advertising / spyware, etc. It just works the way it's supposed to.
The iPod is a great deal. The iTunes Music Store is a terrible deal. The original poster doesn't seem to get that at all, nor do most of the press.
sulli
RTFJ.
It may have given "you" the perception you're in control, but you're not, you have been betrayed by every corner of the commercial industry. The only unique factor about Apple and the iPod is they've made the betrayal seem warm and fuzzy.
You are confusing the iTunes Music Store with the iPod.
I have purchased 6 iPods and currently use 2 (sold the others). I haven't purchased a single track from the iTunes music store yet my iPods are full of music I have legally purchased.
I am fully in control of that music, as mentioned in the article. The iPod works perfectly with plain 'ole mp3 files.
It is primarily due to ipod's (and itune's) highly intuitive and easy-to-use interface that made it a real winner. It made it possible for anyone who would otherwise be afraid to touch a new high-tech gizmo, instantly comfortable with ipod. And Apple's marketing of ipod is another factor contributing to ipod's success. The initial buzz that was created with white earbuds was something many marketing teams dream about launching their products.
Of course, being able to buy a track at a time is a great thing and definitely helped ipod gain market-share. But, Apple didn't invent it. It was there before ipod.
Osho
Now only if they would get rid of the DRM, I would actually buy stuff there too. Right now, it's too risky. Who can guarantee me that in 10 years I can still play the music I buy now ?
I'm not quite sure why this is flamebait. The iPod has surpassed other MP3 players largely because Apple has been able to position it well, turning it into a status symbol.
It is a quality product, but look at Bose speakers. Marketing goes a long way.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
"What does the Apple player do that my Lyra or iRiver MP3 players do not"
Have a decent user interface. That may not be important to you, but it is important to a couple of people. Those people bought iPods.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yep 14,822 songs on my computer organized by itunes and playable on my ipod, not one of which was purchased from the itunes music store, not one of which has a trace of DRM. Would we all use ogg in an ideal world? Perhaps, but this will do because in practice I can have ALL my music without DRM anyway way I want to "acquire" it, and including in the apple's lossless compression format which sounds EXACTLY the same as a cd. In theory it sucks, in practice not too bad. That's why I've drunk the Apple cool-aid even as a lefty crunchy co-opy kind of guy who supports OSS in theory. Much as I'd like a perfect free software world I dread the thought of configuring ALSA or what ever the latest flaky GNU/OSS OS audio subsystem is at the moment. Hint sound has NEVER worked properly for me installing Ubuntu on two different p.c.s. Linux/BSD is a GREAT server and as a home entertainment OS? Not so much...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Being locked in is still bad - even if you really like the food at your prison.
The day Apple decides to change their business model, or to tweak what they allow you to do is the day you'll notice.
I own an iPod nano, which stayed virgin for about half an hour after buying it - it never had a single song uploaded and played with Apple's software. I run rockbox on it and have freedom to use it as I see fit.
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
Amarok needs a hell of a lot of work. The only thing I managed to get it to do was freeze. When I tried to add the ~1000 songs I have on my computer, it quickly ate up all my memory and then stopped doing much of anything, slowing the rest of the system down to the point that I had to do a hard reboot.
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are a number of ways around this. You're right, it's annoying for the average user, but not so annoying that it offsets all the benefits of iPod + iTunes.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
I must be misunderstanding you... it is possible and very easy to sort by Artist or Album. What do you mean?
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Even so, every other player on the market lacks something compared to the iPod, be it style, features, capacity, ease of use, etc. The iPod is quite well rounded. By the way, it's "du jour."
* Rip with Konqueror's audiocd: function. With too lame, ogg is a concern only for those who care about freedom and saving 10-20% of storage space. Correct lables, flac, ogg and mp3 encoding has never been easier. ABCDE provides more robust ripping from the command line if you want that.
* Record analog with Krec, Krecord, Audacity or Gramofile. Use Rockbox for your iPod or iRiver portable device.
* Get your new music off the web. The Internet Archive [archive.org] has more than 30,000 concerts by artists that want you to share. Most players have built in stream sources.
* Play and organize your music with Amarok. It's all the goodness of iTunes with none of the annoyances.
Yeah, or they could use one program to do all of that and not waste time mucking about with the command line, updating dependencies (depending on what distro you're using) and generally jumping through a number of annoying hoops just to perform one simple task. This is one of the main reasons that Linux as a whole has very little share of the desktop market - lack of integration. Everything in Linux relies on something else, and while that's more efficient for servers, it's just a huge pain in the ass for home users.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
No, the main obstacle is that all of the free software you've listed is about a billion times less convenient than iTunes or even Windows Media Player, especially to anyone without extensive knowledge of computers.
You know, I'm tired of this. One goes to the itunes store and buys a music file with a known quality (they even let you sample it), known limitations, etc. If you don't like those limitations then don't pay them and they won't let you download the file. Do they market their product, yep sure. But complaining that their marketing "tricked you" is just admitting to being stupid. The terms of sale are very clear. Do they give you an unprotected digital copy of the original master? Nope, but neither do they claim to do so. They claim to be an easy way to get a "legal" copy of popular music of a "reasonable" quality with a, fairly lenient, policy of what you can do with it once you've downloaded it. What you and your fellow critics don't seem to like is that they are being successful doing this. That's fine, you can complain all you want. The fact of the matter is, that the business model is working for them. It has the opportunity to change some aspects of the music industry, perhaps evening creating a market for other than just the big names and big labels. Time will see.... But, stop claiming that they are tricking people. You just look like an idiot.
I'm suprised this was marked as a troll.
Because his post is that of an anti-DRM troll. DRM is only tangentially relevant to the topic at hand, yet he used it as an excuse to go on an ideological rant.
No one *wants* DRM, but most everyone will accept it under reasonable terms. Apple's terms are more than reasonable. Posting such an unreasonable rant about reasonable DRM is not insightful--at least, yagu's rant isn't. His post is inflammatory, and really qualifies as a troll or flamebait, even though I'm sure he truly believes in what he posted.
Guess the apple fans don't like insightful opinions.
What was insightful about his post? Nothing in it was relevant to the topic of the iPod. Most of it was ideological vitriol. And the only reasonable part, which you point out below, was aimed at a company that did the *exact opposite* of the "CDDB betrayal" he complains about!
How is that not a troll, or at the very least flamebait?
Insightful? Are you mad?
The point about the CDDB database is relevent. It seems that all to often companies don't really understand what the consumer wants. Often times, the quality of community created software is vastly superior to anything a company would come out with due to their marketing restrictions.
Yes, all too often companies *don't* listen to their customers. The whole point of this slashdot story is that Apple does, and created a product that gives the customer what they really and truly want in the iPod.
In reponse to your comments:
1) Usability of the device as a portable USB drive is a feature, NOT an interface issue.
2) It just so happens that iPods CAN be used as portable USB drives.
3) This has to be the first time I hear anyone claim that any Linux product offers superior interface or ease of use than Windows, let alone Apple, which is synonymous with brilliant design and ease of use. Linux fans can harp about security, open source, and standards compliance all they want, but the platform's notoriously poor ease of use and inconsistent interfaces are legendary, and the principal reason why Linux has barely made a dent in the desktop market.
4) MusicMatch Jukebox is and has always been notorious for its poor reliability and performance. It is one of the chief reasons I hated MP3 players before buying my first iPod. The moment Apple released iTunes for Windows and demonstrated they could write better and more reliable Windows software than any of the seasoned experts in the Windows world, that was all it took to begin the mass exodus to Apple's iPod. iTunes HUMILIATED every Windows based software product of its kind, particularly when it came to its flawless and effortless synchronization with the iPod. No more crashes. No more lost songs. No more sync failures. No more troubleshooting of the hardware/software communications configuration.
5) You, like all the losers in the Microsoft/Creative/iRiver camp, insist on looking for "features" and "specs" that you can match or beat against the iPod. You keep refusing to look at what everyone is clamoring about - the user interface and the overall user experience. Believe it or not, there's such a huge chasm separating the two platforms in this area, that most people will gladly pay twice as much for an iPod with half the storage space and extra features as a competing product from Creative or iRiver. Oh, and before buying my first iPod, I almost bought an iRiver player. That is, until I saw one in person and it felt like some crude toy that might fall apart in a few hours. Five minutes hands on with that iRiver was all it took to write it off as a candidate.
Your "nothing more" bit is the flamebait modifier.
There were at least five things that made the iPod stand out above the other MP3 players in 2001; it wasn't until 2004 that Creative Labs caught up.
1) Size/Density: In 2001 the iPod was 5gb in the size of a deck of cards. The 6gb Nomad Jukebox was the size of a Mac mini and the 256mb Rio PMP was the size of a Zippo. The similar 1.8" HDD Zen Touch wasn't released until 2004.
2) Upload speed: In 2001 the iPod used Firewire to upload songs at 12mb/s, compared to the 1mb/s of the USB Nomad Jukebox. You could fill an iPod in 7 minutes, while it would take over 80 minutes for the Nomad.
3) Usability: In 2001 the iPod had 4 buttons and a scrollwheel to access the songs, playlist, volume, and position. The Nomad Jukebox had 11 buttons to do the same; one could be used in one hand, the other could not.
4) iTunes: In 2001 you only had to plug in the iPod for it to charge, upload, and synchronize. The Rio and Creatives of that age required you to create playlists, drag files, and use special functions in software. iTunes was literally plug, wait, unplug, and play.
5) Mass Storage: This gave the iPod immense geek cred. Your iPod was a vanilla Firewire/USB mass storage device. I installed OS X on mine.
It took competitors three years to catch up; in the mean time Apple had released the iPod mini, which Creative countered with the Zen Micro 9 months later and the Zen Touch was the first Zen to use a 1.8" HDD also in 2004. All the while Apple released smaller and lighter iPods, cheaper and higher density iPods, and Windows compatibility to boot.
Is it any surprise they succeeded when everyone else was giving them the keys to the kingdom?
GPL Deconstructed
David Pogue said it best in a NYTimes article (free, no reg required for Pogue's articles) about a(nother, ho hum) Samsung MP3 player.
He points out that Apple didn't get just one thing right, they got a bunch of things right AND made them work well together.
== Quote:
The iPod's competitors have wasted years of opportunity by assuming that they can beat the iPod on features and price alone. They're wrong.
In fact, at least six factors make the iPod such a hit:
cool-looking hardware;
a fun-to-use, variable-speed scroll wheel;
an ultrasimple software menu;
effortless song synchronization with Mac or Windows;
seamless, rock-solid integration with an online music store (iTunes);
and a universe of accessories.
Mess up any aspect of the formula, and your iPod killer is doomed to market-share crumbs.
== Endquote.
I'd argue that they also got the ITMS business model right, in addition to the superb integration of the above six.
You'll note there's no mention of marketing anywhere there.
Sitting here with moderator points this morning, I was really torn. I could have just pulled the "Flamebait" dropdown, but I'm hoping that you'll take these comments to heart.