Editorials

The Irish Times view on the end of the iPod: When the music stops

Standalone music player looks like a relic in an age of smartphones and watches

For Apple, the iPod paved the way for the iPhone, a device that would change global communications forever. Photograph: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Fri May 13 2022 - 19:55

The iPod would never take off. That was a common early view of the white box with its distinctive click-wheel when it was launched to as much scorn as admiration by Apple in 2001.

It had an attractive design and could hold a then-unthinkable 1,000 songs, but who would pay $400 for a portable music player that only worked with a Mac? And who needed 1,000 songs in their pocket anyway?

The sceptics couldn't have been more wrong. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player on the market, but it would quickly come to dominate and then vastly expand that new market. Within five years Apple had sold 50 million of them. The product burnished the reputation of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs and set the company on a course that would make it the world's most valuable firm. And the iPod would revolutionise the music industry, leaving an ambiguous, contested legacy.

The arrival of the iTunes store a year after the iPod brought the digital music market into the mainstream and stemmed illegal filesharing. People now paid for something they had been getting free.

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But the money – or at least enough of it – did not make its way to the artists whose music Apple was selling. CD sales plummeted but downloads never came close to compensating for the lost revenue. The shuffle function and the sale of individual tracks caused endless angst about the integrity of the album as a concept.

For Apple, the iPod paved the way for the iPhone, a device that would change global communications forever. For the music industry, it laid the ground for the streaming age and for the emergence of giants such as Spotify.

Before long the iPod, a standalone music player, would begin to look like a relic in an age when everyone had high-speed internet-enabled devices on their wrist or in their pocket.

Apple announced this week that it is discontinuing iPod Touch, the final iteration of the device. In the age of the smartphone and of constant distraction and choice, some will hold onto their original iPod – that palm-sized sliver with its intuitive click-wheel that did one thing and did it well.

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