The iTunes Music Store turned 20 on Friday.
When it was introduced on April 28, 2003 for the Macintosh computer, the online music store was – as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs put it in the company’s announcement at the time – “revolutionary.”
“The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use and to put music on an unlimited number of iPods for on-the-go listening,” Jobs said. “Consumers don’t want to be treated like criminals and artists don’t want their valuable work stolen. The iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution for both.”
The online music store allowed people to search for and purchase specific tracks of music for what was then the bargain price of just 99 cents per song. It also gave customers the ability to burn songs onto an unlimited number of CDs as CDs served, in part, as the playlists of today, and songs could be played on up to three Macintosh computers, an unlimited number of iPods (the iPhone was still four years away at that time), and could be sued in any application on the Mac including iPhoto and iMovie.
The iTunes Music Store was, at launched, integrated into iTunes 4, the now-deprecated music player and media library that was introduced by Jobs in 2001.
Apple launched both iTunes and the music store on the Windows platform in October 2003. In just five months, the online store had become the “number one download music service in the world,” Apple said at the time, noting that customers had purchased over 13 million songs using it.
The iTunes brand has been largely displaced by Apple Music and the functionality of the iTunes Music Store is now located within that app.
Meanwhile, the Apple iPod, the forefather of the iPhone and the device that changed the Cupertino, California company’s trajectory from computer manufacturer to maker of personal devices and operator of a major online music marketplace, was discontinued one year ago, in May 2022.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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