It wasn't the case of any individual feature of iTunes or the iPod, it was that iTunes and the iPod were the killer feature. If you were to have looked at the

It wasn't the case of any individual feature of iTunes or the iPod, it was that iTunes and the iPod were the killer feature. If you were to have looked at the landscape at that time for MP3 players, there was nothing even remotely like the iTunes+iPod experience. Even the tagline of the very first commercial was ridiculous at the time: "iPod, a thousand songs, in your pocket." That was equivalent to Google giving people 1GB of storage with their GMail account. It doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in 2001 it was a very big deal.