So what I'm getting from this thread is there are no reasons why the iPod would become successful, would go on to dominate the portable music player market and

So what I'm getting from this thread is there are no reasons why the iPod would become successful, would go on to dominate the portable music player market and reconcile the music publishers with digital downloads. In fact, it seems most likely that those things didn't happen at all, and if they did it was because of Apple's magic marketing which is cheating, rather than real reasons.