Ten years ago, if you wanted to download some music, you either had to do it illegally or use low-quality streaming services from rival record companies that prohibited burning to disc and downloads.
What happened? Steve Jobs happened, mainly.
The design team at Apple came up with the iPod, and Jobs persuaded the music companies – which wouldn’t license their songs to bigger names like Microsoft – to go with him because, he said, Apple was tiny (which it was, at the time, a few percent of the PC market).
Record labels figured they’d sell about a million songs a year, so they signed up. Apple sold a million in the first week in the US alone, and 3 million within a month. It’s never looked back.
(READ the story at the Paid Content)