6 ms·

I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pi

I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 years later, but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods ?

anthomtb 4y ago
>music pricing. For sure. My memory of those days is getting hazy, but IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. Maybe $12 if you were lucky. Considering inflation and that you might only want two of the twelve songs on the disk, you could easily be paying $10/song (in 2023 dollars). Big chunk of change especially for a pre-teen or teenager.
- rconti 4y ago
  I seem to recall typically being able to buy major CDs in the $14 range in ~1995, but the expensive stores (Tower Records) charged $18.99 and up which is very clear in my mind. That's more than $37 in today's money.
- damascus 4y ago
  I miss what.cd. It was such a great way of discovering new music back before there were algos recommending stuff to you 24/7.
  - dban 4y ago
    I also miss what so much
  - rOOb85 4y ago
    Like always, communities reform. There’s a Swiss site now that I’ll have to leaved “REDacted” that is just as good if not better than what.cd
- Seanambers 4y ago
  Can't imagine anyone putting anything other than pirated mp3s in 95%+ of mp3 players ever produced.
  - kilolima 4y ago
    So would it be fair to say that Apple built the iPod to take advantage of music piracy?
- bacchusracine 4y ago
  >IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. That's because the labels were engaging in pricefixing and blacklisting retailers who did not go along with their scheme. People suspected it but nothing really happened until the FTC stepped in. https://archive.is/3thhx https://archive.is/3thhx Even then the result was basically a slap on the wrist and most people had begun using P2P instead.
philistine 4y ago
Like you said, Napster et al. Apple pretended it came from CDs people had bought.
- justinator 4y ago
  I surely remember much of my computer time being from ripping my CDs, borrowing friend's CDs to rip, going to the library (excellent source, really), to rip their CDs, etc. Napster was all but toast once iTunes was on the scene, but Kaza and Limewire weren't any better in the problem of getting say, a whole album (those were still a thing) perfectly cataloged with metadata - and in high quality. iTunes made that very easy. With the iPod, I would then just borrow people's iPods instead of CDs. I didn't get into - and actually still don't subscribe to, a music service like Spotify. A few years after starting above, I would still just buy CDs from touring bands (these were bands driving cross country in vans and playing condemned warehouses, so safe to say their stuff wasn't being traded as mp3's, and if they were, they would have LOVED it). I remember buying some music off of iTunes Music, but I tried to not, as sharing their the system I had didn't work well - or even across my own devices. MySpace Music was also big in discovery. Their whole music catalog was lost, though, right? Someone lost the private key?
  - mattl 4y ago
    > MySpace Music was also big in discovery. Their whole music catalog was lost, though, right? Someone lost the private key? I think archive.org found a bunch of it, but some of it was deleted.
- jjk166 4y ago
  I mean, people at the time did have large collections of CDs with tons of music. Piracy existed, sure, but it was something a relatively small number of tech-savvy people were doing. Hell only half of Americans were even using the internet at the time. And at the time, MP3s were super inconvenient - you needed a CD for your stereo or whatever you were listening to music on, and CD-R drives had only just started to become cheap (and by cheap, I still mean several hundred dollars, which was quite a bit at the time). I would be in no way surprised if greater than 90% of the music that was loaded onto the first cohort of ipods came directly from CDs.
scarface74 4y ago
The iPod came out in 2001. The iTunes Music Store came out in 2003. And the iTunes app itself came out 9 months before the iPod. Apple had a big marketing push “rip, mix, burn”. iTunes had excellent support for ripping CDs and burning them to CD. I used iTunes for creating CDs for years and didn’t get my first iPod until 2006.
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Back in the early days of podcast support I remember downloading episodes over dialup (slower than real time) and burning them to CD occasionally for listening elsewhere
ar_lan 4y ago
> Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I think this is why Spotify/Netflix are so successful. Streaming a good amount of content for a reasonable price is more convenient + less time wasted (+ less stress and moral implications) compared to pirating. I used to pirate music/videos all the time and the moment those services were available I stopped because it was just easier to use them. Good UX can trump many other factors.
- jdmichal 4y ago
  The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform. It was a library management platform (2001) that also offered purchase and download of FairPlay DRM-laden music files (2003). Later it would offer DRM-free MP3 download for select music (2007) and eventually its entire catalog (2009).
  - swores 4y ago
    Why be so quick to jump to "I can tell someone why they're wrong"? Taking the time to read their comment a second time might lead to the realisation that they clearly weren't commenting based on a perceived connection of 'streaming platforms', the connection was "business models which succeeded on account of offering a legal & convenient service cheap enough for people to choose it over their previous piracy". Maybe I've just done the exact same thing, perhaps I was wrong to read an attempted correction into your comment and you just thought you were adding some interesting additional information to the conversation. In which case my bad, and sorry. But I think unlikely you'd share that as random "fun fact" extra info rather than replying to a misunderstanding of the previous comment's point.
  - ar_lan 4y ago
    > The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform. I never said it was. The point was not a comparison of iTunes to streaming - but the proposed UX enhancement iTunes provided mapped a way that was even simpler than pirating per u/HarHarVeryFunny, which made it worth it at the time to switch from pirating in their mind. Streaming made this even easier in my opinion, and was the catalyst that prompted me to stop. Granted - when I was a teenager, I simply didn't have any money even for iTunes purchases - but when Spotify came around, I had just gotten my first job, and made the switch then.
derefr 4y ago
> but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod; but the iTunes Music Store was not. iTunes was, at first, a CD ripping program (and library manager for music ripped from CD.) To buy music for your iPod, you'd go to the record store, buy a CD, put it in your Mac, rip it, and then load it onto the iPod. And while, yes, music piracy slightly predated the iTunes Music Store, there were a lot of people buying iPods in that era who had fancy Mac computers, but just plain didn't have internet service to their homes, and so for whom music piracy wasn't really a possibility†. 2001 was an interesting time; Internet access was still very unevenly distributed, and in ways that had nothing to do with economic conditions. Rural areas might have phone lines so bad that even a 28.8kbps modem wouldn't work over them. The rollout of ISDN was only just getting started, and was limited to regions with less red tape (much like fiber rollouts in the last decade.) † Well, okay, a different form of music piracy was probably happening in these Internet-starved areas: if you were willing to shell out for a CD burner for your Mac (not an internal option, rather an external SCSI-over-Firewire one), then you could also use iTunes to burn those ripped songs back onto a mix-tape CD — and then you could give them to your friends, who could in turn rip them to their PCs. Shame about the quality loss in the process (given iTunes' default ripping encoding of 128kbps AAC — though 256kbps AAC was possible even back then), but it'd be no worse than what dubbing between literal compact cassettes would get you, and certainly better than what you'd get by downloading the Napster-standard 96kbps MP3. (And CD-to-CD streaming bitwise dubbing was also possible back then, too, but not with iTunes, only expensive third-party software; I don't think anyone but professional bootleggers had any reason to try that for music. It was more a thing for ensuring you get clean working copies of PC "must have the CD-ROM in to play" games.)
- giobox 4y ago
  > in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous. Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 95/98 etc, and by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one. The firewire port was largely because IIRC USB 2 didnt exist at launch of iPod - transferring 5GB via USB 1 was painfully slow, the trick the iPod could do at the time that no competitor could was sync 1000 songs incredibly quickly. > iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod This isn't the case, iTunes was released before the iPod- before iPod "Rip/Mix/Burn" was a big marketing strategy for the iMac. The iPod did follow quickly though. Many of us had substantial libraries in iTunes before the iPod landed. Wikipedia suggests it was iTunes 2.0 that brought iPod support.
simongray 4y ago
There was no iTunes music store at that time. Apple was advertising how fast iTunes could rip music from a CD and in my experience it was definitely optimised for that.
- newsclues 4y ago
  Yes. They made it easy to add your existing collection to digital, and also import a library from the friendly pirates. Then they made it easy to buy new music, after people were in the ecosystem.
chongli 4y ago
I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not iTunes was released in January of 2001, 9 months before the release of the first generation iPod in October 2001.
dml2135 4y ago
Ripping CDs was common practice back then, in addition to all the piracy you mentioned. I'm pretty sure iTunes had a built-in feature for it.
- deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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anthomtb 4y ago

>music pricing. For sure. My memory of those days is getting hazy, but IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. Maybe $12 if you were lucky. Considering inflation and that you might only want two of the twelve songs on the disk, you could easily be paying $10/song (in 2023 dollars). Big chunk of change especially for a pre-teen or teenager.

rconti 4y ago
I seem to recall typically being able to buy major CDs in the $14 range in ~1995, but the expensive stores (Tower Records) charged $18.99 and up which is very clear in my mind. That's more than $37 in today's money.
damascus 4y ago
I miss what.cd. It was such a great way of discovering new music back before there were algos recommending stuff to you 24/7.
- dban 4y ago
  I also miss what so much
- rOOb85 4y ago
  Like always, communities reform. There’s a Swiss site now that I’ll have to leaved “REDacted” that is just as good if not better than what.cd
Seanambers 4y ago
Can't imagine anyone putting anything other than pirated mp3s in 95%+ of mp3 players ever produced.
- kilolima 4y ago
  So would it be fair to say that Apple built the iPod to take advantage of music piracy?
bacchusracine 4y ago
>IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. That's because the labels were engaging in pricefixing and blacklisting retailers who did not go along with their scheme. People suspected it but nothing really happened until the FTC stepped in. https://archive.is/3thhx https://archive.is/3thhx Even then the result was basically a slap on the wrist and most people had begun using P2P instead.

philistine 4y ago

Like you said, Napster et al. Apple pretended it came from CDs people had bought.

justinator 4y ago
I surely remember much of my computer time being from ripping my CDs, borrowing friend's CDs to rip, going to the library (excellent source, really), to rip their CDs, etc. Napster was all but toast once iTunes was on the scene, but Kaza and Limewire weren't any better in the problem of getting say, a whole album (those were still a thing) perfectly cataloged with metadata - and in high quality. iTunes made that very easy. With the iPod, I would then just borrow people's iPods instead of CDs. I didn't get into - and actually still don't subscribe to, a music service like Spotify. A few years after starting above, I would still just buy CDs from touring bands (these were bands driving cross country in vans and playing condemned warehouses, so safe to say their stuff wasn't being traded as mp3's, and if they were, they would have LOVED it). I remember buying some music off of iTunes Music, but I tried to not, as sharing their the system I had didn't work well - or even across my own devices. MySpace Music was also big in discovery. Their whole music catalog was lost, though, right? Someone lost the private key?
- mattl 4y ago
  > MySpace Music was also big in discovery. Their whole music catalog was lost, though, right? Someone lost the private key? I think archive.org found a bunch of it, but some of it was deleted.
jjk166 4y ago
I mean, people at the time did have large collections of CDs with tons of music. Piracy existed, sure, but it was something a relatively small number of tech-savvy people were doing. Hell only half of Americans were even using the internet at the time. And at the time, MP3s were super inconvenient - you needed a CD for your stereo or whatever you were listening to music on, and CD-R drives had only just started to become cheap (and by cheap, I still mean several hundred dollars, which was quite a bit at the time). I would be in no way surprised if greater than 90% of the music that was loaded onto the first cohort of ipods came directly from CDs.

scarface74 4y ago

The iPod came out in 2001. The iTunes Music Store came out in 2003. And the iTunes app itself came out 9 months before the iPod. Apple had a big marketing push “rip, mix, burn”. iTunes had excellent support for ripping CDs and burning them to CD. I used iTunes for creating CDs for years and didn’t get my first iPod until 2006.

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Back in the early days of podcast support I remember downloading episodes over dialup (slower than real time) and burning them to CD occasionally for listening elsewhere

ar_lan 4y ago

> Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I think this is why Spotify/Netflix are so successful. Streaming a good amount of content for a reasonable price is more convenient + less time wasted (+ less stress and moral implications) compared to pirating. I used to pirate music/videos all the time and the moment those services were available I stopped because it was just easier to use them. Good UX can trump many other factors.

jdmichal 4y ago
The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform. It was a library management platform (2001) that also offered purchase and download of FairPlay DRM-laden music files (2003). Later it would offer DRM-free MP3 download for select music (2007) and eventually its entire catalog (2009).
- swores 4y ago
  Why be so quick to jump to "I can tell someone why they're wrong"? Taking the time to read their comment a second time might lead to the realisation that they clearly weren't commenting based on a perceived connection of 'streaming platforms', the connection was "business models which succeeded on account of offering a legal & convenient service cheap enough for people to choose it over their previous piracy". Maybe I've just done the exact same thing, perhaps I was wrong to read an attempted correction into your comment and you just thought you were adding some interesting additional information to the conversation. In which case my bad, and sorry. But I think unlikely you'd share that as random "fun fact" extra info rather than replying to a misunderstanding of the previous comment's point.
- ar_lan 4y ago
  > The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform. I never said it was. The point was not a comparison of iTunes to streaming - but the proposed UX enhancement iTunes provided mapped a way that was even simpler than pirating per u/HarHarVeryFunny, which made it worth it at the time to switch from pirating in their mind. Streaming made this even easier in my opinion, and was the catalyst that prompted me to stop. Granted - when I was a teenager, I simply didn't have any money even for iTunes purchases - but when Spotify came around, I had just gotten my first job, and made the switch then.

derefr 4y ago

> but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod; but the iTunes Music Store was not. iTunes was, at first, a CD ripping program (and library manager for music ripped from CD.) To buy music for your iPod, you'd go to the record store, buy a CD, put it in your Mac, rip it, and then load it onto the iPod. And while, yes, music piracy slightly predated the iTunes Music Store, there were a lot of people buying iPods in that era who had fancy Mac computers, but just plain didn't have internet service to their homes, and so for whom music piracy wasn't really a possibility†. 2001 was an interesting time; Internet access was still very unevenly distributed, and in ways that had nothing to do with economic conditions. Rural areas might have phone lines so bad that even a 28.8kbps modem wouldn't work over them. The rollout of ISDN was only just getting started, and was limited to regions with less red tape (much like fiber rollouts in the last decade.) † Well, okay, a different form of music piracy was probably happening in these Internet-starved areas: if you were willing to shell out for a CD burner for your Mac (not an internal option, rather an external SCSI-over-Firewire one), then you could also use iTunes to burn those ripped songs back onto a mix-tape CD — and then you could give them to your friends, who could in turn rip them to their PCs. Shame about the quality loss in the process (given iTunes' default ripping encoding of 128kbps AAC — though 256kbps AAC was possible even back then), but it'd be no worse than what dubbing between literal compact cassettes would get you, and certainly better than what you'd get by downloading the Napster-standard 96kbps MP3. (And CD-to-CD streaming bitwise dubbing was also possible back then, too, but not with iTunes, only expensive third-party software; I don't think anyone but professional bootleggers had any reason to try that for music. It was more a thing for ensuring you get clean working copies of PC "must have the CD-ROM in to play" games.)

giobox 4y ago
> in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous. Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 95/98 etc, and by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one. The firewire port was largely because IIRC USB 2 didnt exist at launch of iPod - transferring 5GB via USB 1 was painfully slow, the trick the iPod could do at the time that no competitor could was sync 1000 songs incredibly quickly. > iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod This isn't the case, iTunes was released before the iPod- before iPod "Rip/Mix/Burn" was a big marketing strategy for the iMac. The iPod did follow quickly though. Many of us had substantial libraries in iTunes before the iPod landed. Wikipedia suggests it was iTunes 2.0 that brought iPod support.

simongray 4y ago

There was no iTunes music store at that time. Apple was advertising how fast iTunes could rip music from a CD and in my experience it was definitely optimised for that.

newsclues 4y ago
Yes. They made it easy to add your existing collection to digital, and also import a library from the friendly pirates. Then they made it easy to buy new music, after people were in the ecosystem.

chongli 4y ago

I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not iTunes was released in January of 2001, 9 months before the release of the first generation iPod in October 2001.

dml2135 4y ago

Ripping CDs was common practice back then, in addition to all the piracy you mentioned. I'm pretty sure iTunes had a built-in feature for it.

deleted 4y ago
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