4 ms·
"Apple, the company that turned digital music into a mainstream phenomenon" Is this guy serious?
by izzydata 12y ago
"Apple, the company that turned digital music into a mainstream phenomenon"
Is this guy serious?
- JTon 12y agoIs that not what Apple did with the iPod and iTunes? I don't see a problem with that statement
- Osmium 12y agoWhat's uncontroversial about that? The iTunes Store did make (legal) digital music mainstream. That's not to say it was the first store of its kind, but it was certainly the first to have widespread success.
- izzydata 12y agoCDs are digital music, everyone was listening to digital music before apple did anything. People were using walkmans long before the iPod. The point is trying to credit apple for "digital" music as opposed to "analog" music. That is just absurd. Credit them from making a business out of selling digital music, but not for making digital music popular.
- Osmium 12y agoCompletely fair point – I was reading "digital" in this context as something ephemeral, like a computer file (mp3s etc.), rather than a physical object such as CD, even though as you say CDs are digital too.
- jmelloy 12y agoI don't think anybody realistically considers a CD "digital".
- __david__ 12y agoOf course they do, in general—there's nothing analog about CDs. But in this context it clearly meant "digital downloads".
- coralreef 12y agoOr maybe "digital" means "mp3 delivered over internet" in this instance.
- chc 12y agoYou're being pedantic. The author was clearly not talking about media formats like CDs, which store music digitally as an implementation detail but are still a physical object that you buy just like records and tapes. It seems pretty clear that the author is talking about music whose primary form is purely digital, like MP3s that you could download on your computer and transfer to your iPod. Put another way: Anybody can tell you what a CD looks like — round, shiny, flat, about yea wide — but nobody knows what an MP3 looks like, because it is a purely digital format. The difference of physicality is the salient part here.
- sscalia 12y agoHow's the autism spectrum treating you? "CDS ARE DIGITAL MUSIC!!!"
- dmerrick 12y agoWell, they did invent the iPod.
- v3rt 12y agoI think he's getting at the fact that the iPod and iTunes were what first made people think of music in digital terms. An audio CD might as well be analog as far as people's perception goes, since until MP3 players came around, ripping CDs was not the typical use case.
- neduma 12y agoIts bit exaggeration. But come to think of it, we could not clearly state anyone else did more impact to DIGITAL music than Apple.
- wmeredith 12y agoiTunes is 64% of the digital music market and 29% of all music sold in the world. I don't see what's wrong with that statement.
- danudey 12y agoNot to mention the iPod spent a huge amount of time at >90% market share for MP3 players.
- tantalor 12y agoI think the author is referring to digital music stored in electronic storage (e.g. flash memory, hard drive) versus physical media (e.g. compact disc).
- izzydata 12y agoSure, the author may of had the right intentions, but in the end after everyone has read that statement there will be plenty of people that take away from it that Apple invented digital music. Wording is important.
- mariusmg 12y agoActually Fraunhofer did this (the creators of the first mp3 encoder).