Technology in music series; (part 14) Hardware and software – on demand and on your hip (IV)

For the most part, the companies that made these products tended to be small. They also were generally run by technologists intent on inventing the better musical mousetrap without any clue how to get retailers excited about them and get the product into stores. In other cases, all the money went to R&D and manufacturing, leaving little for the necessary sales and marketing. Some also point to the musical-industrial complex – the big-box stores live and die by brands like Phillips, Sony, and Panasonic, which all have convenient ties to the record business.

These companies were not about to put out one product that would actively undermine another, nor would they happily and cooperatively do business with stores that did. So while sheer customer demand got the Rio into some stores – more computer-oriented retailers than audio dealers – the Brujo was generally available through the same means as most of the music played on it – the internet.

It took the exceedingly deep pockets of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs to create the first truly disruptive technology in the digital music hardware world, ironically making use of one of Christensen’s favourite examples of disruptive technology – the ever-shrinking size and ever-growing capacity of hard disk drives. Whereas his competitors had done very little consumer outreach in the market, Jobs had the wherewithal to create a masterful piece of marketing: the iPod

The iPod was a $500 toy, and its signature white headphones became a status symbol, a sign of the discretionary income, musical taste, and technological savvy the piece came to represent. Introduced toward the end of 2001, when the SongBank and so many other pieces of digital music hardware had turned to vapour, the device demonstrated that timing was not the problem.

Indeed, several other players did come to market, but with limited success – Sony had a smaller player, but it only held a couple of dozen songs. The Creative Nomad was a large, unwieldly piece of equipment. By combining a pocket-sized footprint with a capacity for thousands of songs and ergonomic controls, most people regarded it as the most advanced digital music player on the market. The iPod became the generic name in MP3 players very quickly, perhaps this one object replacing the space-consuming fetish object represented by the record collection.

It helped that Jobs threw all of the company’s marketing muscle behind the product. A series of television commercials combined with 22 magazine inserts. The slogan for the accompanying iTunes software made digital music fans cheer while making record executives’ blood run cold: “Rip. Mix. Burn.” Where, before the introduction of the iPod, the other hard-drive-based players had sold 26,000 pieces, within three years, Apple had released four generations of iPod and sold over 10 million units.

It did everything Ice-T had wished for – it could play nearly two weeks’ worth of music, go anywhere, and attach to a home or car stereo. The hardware had finally caught up with the revolution, and now the revolution was going mainstream.

As noted in previous articles, it took until 2004 before the major labels allowed the consolidation of their copyrights onto one system, and that feat took Jobs to accomplish it. This kicked the legal genie out of the bottle, and before long, consumers could download music from the major record companies legally from over a dozen places. According to a 2005 survey by Forrester Research, 25 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds planned to buy an MP3 player during the course of that year. Forrester further found that 20 percent of the people in that same demographic actually buy their downloads, but pointed out that better than half also “share” music via CD exchanges, e-mails, blogs, and local networks. However, the “promoters” who do the most sharing, they found, also do the most buying.

Another disruptive technology was advancing by leaps and bounds alongside the digital music world. Cell phones had gone from expensive luxury item for the very wealthy to a mainstream item that achieved about a 66 percent market penetration in the United States and over 100 percent per capita penetration in Sweden, Italy, Austria, and the United Kingdom, with many people owning multiple phones. Many people use their cell phone as their primary (or even their only) phone.

As sales increased, the technology also followed Moore’s Law, doubling in power every couple of year. One area where this became highly evident was the development of the ringtone. Ringtones initially just played a melody line, then they gained the capacity for entire computer-generated arrangements, and finally they were able to play actual digital recordings of favourite songs.