iPod and the birth of iTunes
Apple put 1,000 songs in your pocket. But where were we getting those songs from?
Digital music disasters: Microsoft, Zune, and PlaysForSure
>>>Microsoft’s response to the iPod was to copy it, make it brown and add some truly terrible desktop software. But its bigger mistake was PlaysForSure, a DRM platform that locked your music to Microsoft–approved devices just as DRM was falling out of favor with music.
THE iPOD WAS a big hit for all kinds of reasons. It was better than the competition, it was easy to use, and it had white headphones that would become the focus of an iconic ad campaign.
The first iPod campaign included one of Steve Jobs’ pet hates: people. Jobs preferred not to use real people in ads because no one person would appeal to everybody. And this particular ad, according to Ken Segall, who worked on ad campaigns with Apple, was “uncomfortable to watch… it was a young guy trying to act cool, and doing so in a fairly pitiful way.”