Innovations and Evolutions - The Demise of Digital Downloads
Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember the rush you got when someone gifted you an iTunes gift card. The anxiety of picking out only a certain number of songs, or do I buy the whole album? Do I buy one song and save the rest for later? The uncertainty of it all was riveting.
On April 28th, 2003, Apple launched their iTunes store. According to an article posted by the Apple website, customers were able to purchase and download music that they wanted to listen to for $0.99 per song. At this time the iTunes store featured over 200,000 songs from many of the major labels. The user could sample up to 30 seconds of a song prior to buying that song to make sure that they wanted to purchase it. Apple launched iTunes just 3 years after the first iPod was released.
While iTunes was not the only way to download music, many sites like Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa were also extremely popular. These sites appealed to users because often times they had hard to find, unreleased, or really old music on them. Not to mention the download was free. Of course this caused a whole slew of issues in regards that firstly these sites were pirating music and essentially stealing from the artist and two the fact that they would kill you computer with virus after virus. These sites worked off of what they called P2P or Peer-to-peer network. Users were file sharing with each other across the globe. The problem with this was that users were using the P2P network, knowing it was illegal because those individuals did not own the copyrights to the music that was being distributed.
Much like Netflix being DVDs mailed to your home, digital music downloads are the equivalent as far as I'm concerned. I honestly can not be the only person who spent hundreds of dollars on digital downloads in my formative years. If only we knew in the 2000s what we know now. Anything and everything you could ever want is at the touch of a finger. With streaming apps, there is no use for digital downloads anymore.
I do admit that sometimes I like to walk down memory lane and fire up my old iTunes account or charge up an old forgotten iPod and listen to my old music and let a huge wave of nostalgia wash over me. On a daily basis though, I get my ten dollars and ninety-nine cents worth of my Spotify membership. I will say that while I miss the ritual of scouring through iTunes and carefully curating what I want to download and hear, I absolutely love that I can listen to whatever I want, whenever I want and I only have to pay $10.99 rather than $1.29 times however many songs.
One of the pros as far as the demise of the digital download is that I have discovered so much new music thanks to the help of my streaming service. I also love that it curates playlists for me and tracks the songs and artists I listen to the most. The demise of digital downloads is a bittersweet one. Much like everything in life, everything changes over time and we will all learn to adapt and overcome as technology advances.
I did not use anything from this article, but it is a very interesting read
https://thenextweb.com/news/a-nostalgic-look-back-at-digital-music-piracy-in-the-2000s
References
Apple. “Apple Launches the ITunes Music Store.” Apple Newsroom, 28 Apr. 2003, www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-Music-Store/.
“The Music Industry’s File-Sharing Odyssey: From Piracy to Ethical Collaboration - Sound Credit - Blog.” Www.soundcredit.com, www.soundcredit.com/blog/the-music-industrys-file-sharing-odyssey-from-piracy-to-ethical-collaboration.
I liked your post — your perspective is very interesting to me, and probably common, as you indicated, but opposite to my experience (though I super relate to that first paragraph — whether to buy or not?? I had a few dollars left on my iTunes account for a while, frozen in indecision, haha.) I had been used to buying CDs at bookstores before, so with the introduction of iTunes, it was very different to be able to buy single songs, and not have to put up with the ones didn’t like. I learned to not buy full albums pretty quickly, even though the discount was tempting (but definitely wasted a lot of money in the process…).
ReplyDeleteAnymore, I’m very choosy about the music I listen to, so I still curate and download everything, and don’t use any streaming apps/services. If I ever want to try out new things, I’ll troll through YouTube to discover new sounds and artists, and then see if I can get ahold of the ones that I really like. Because I don’t listen to music very much, and usually only want to listen to things that I know I will fully enjoy, buying individual songs ends up being cheaper than paying for streaming, for me. (And if I ever want variety, there’s always the radio, which is free!)
I really love your post. I remember the days of meticulously going through the iTunes store and albums and deciding which songs are worth it, and then regretting some of the songs you chose. I also now use Spotify for my everyday music (and podcast!) needs, and it's sooooo much easier than trying to pick only a few songs to listen to on repeat (even though I still do that on Spotify sometimes..).
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