iTunes Music Store launched
11Steve Jobs and his team had watched the growth of music piracy on the internet in the late 1990s and, inspired by Napster’s meteoric rise and its spectacular fall, approached the big 5 music companies in order to create a legal way for consumers to acquire their music online…
Starting with a catalog of only 200 000 songs the iTunes Store sold more than 70 million songs in its first year. Today there are over 75 million tracks available and Apple has sold over 40 billion songs.
Increcredibly even with these figures Apple actually started to lose market share and influence due to the rise of streaming services like Spotify in 2011 and they were slow to add their own subscription service partially because Jobs, who at that point had only recently died, had been against this model.
Though Apple is no longer the only game in town they remain a major, major player and in bringing the music industry into the internet era they helped create the on demand media world we live in today.
Link to full launch event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFaxD8wev8k