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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe end of the iPod: Goodbye to the little box that changed everything
The end of the iPod: Goodbye to the little box that changed everythingIconic iPod shuffles off into history
By Scott Butterworth September 10 at 5:42 PM
It came in with a simple promise, a hefty price tag and a man with something white sticking in his ears bopping around his apartment. Soon, it would transform music as we know it, inspire a business model built around pocket change and turn a struggling computer maker into the most valuable company in the world.
Yet the death Tuesday of the iconic iPod just before its 13th birthday went unacknowledged by that company and by a Silicon Valley crowd that wildly applauded the unveiling of a new phone and a smartwatch products that stood on the slim, metal shoulders of its predecessor. Instead of an announcement, there was only the sad implication of a redirected online page, sending visitors not to information about the iPod Classic but rather to Apples home page.
....
By early 2004, the New York Times would call the iPod not Apple, but just the iPod a billion-dollar business. But the music business would never be the same. The iTunes Music Store had shattered the tyranny of albums: Customers no longer had to buy an entire CD to get the one or two songs they really wanted. (Consider that only six of the 111 albums to sell 10 million copies have been released since the iPods debut.) The decline in album sales led record stores to close their doors for good. The dominant arbiter of Americas musical tastes shifted from Billboard to the iTunes Top 100. Eventually the Beatles and Led Zeppelin gave in and allowed Apple to sell their music, and finally AC/DC did, too. (Garth Brooks is now the most famous holdout.) All this, because of the iPod.
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The end of the iPod: Goodbye to the little box that changed everything (Original Post)
mahatmakanejeeves
Sep 2014
OP
Tommy_Carcetti
(43,085 posts)1. Hard to get too nostalgic about the death of the studio album.
And the loss of music in a physical medium.
Meh.
mahatmakanejeeves
(56,905 posts)2. Oh, dear. I have so many of those. NT
exboyfil
(17,857 posts)3. I still like my cheap MP3 player
when I go on a run. Dogs pulling, dodging bikes, falling ... I would rather have a $40 MP3 hit the ground than a phone.
Of course I have a Tracfone and don't text, web surf, etc.