What Happened To iTunes?

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iTunes was once the most popular place to browse, buy, and listen to music. But that was about 15 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. In fact, many people today consider iTunes to be a bloated, slow, bug-infested application that’s become the victim of its own success. So what exactly happened to iTunes? Well, in order to answer this question, we have to go back to before iTunes ever existed. Before the iTunes Music Store was around, major record labels were having a huge problem with piracy. People were ripping music from CDs and sharing digital song files to every corner of the globe by using peer-to-peer file sharing applications like Napster. But most people weren’t pirating music because they were criminals, they were pirating music because there was no other way to download digital song files in those days. There was no digital music marketplace. If you wanted the latest single from Eminem or Beyonce, you’d have to make a trip to your local record store and spend fifteen or twenty dollars to buy the entire album. Even if that single was the only song you wanted. So you can imagine the appeal of hopping on Napster and downloading individual songs for free from the comfort of your own home, even if it was technically illegal. And because things like the internet and the iPod grew in popularity so quickly, so did digital music piracy, and it caught record labels off guard.

Their initial approach to combat piracy was to make examples out of the worst file-sharers. They did this by taking legal action and threatening the same treatment to any other pirate. But this warning fell on deaf ears since it just wasn’t possible to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Napster users. So then they got another idea, what if music could be copy-protected so that it wouldn’t be possible to rip CDs in the first place? But before the music industry could follow through with that plan, they were approached by Steve Jobs, who introduced a completely new way to combat music piracy. The concept was that you can’t stop people from pirating music, but you can discourage it by offering an easier, more convenient way to find and download digital music at a reasonable price.