Twenty Years Ago, Apple Launched the iTunes Music Store

On April 28, 2003, Apple made a pair of announcements. The first was a new generation of iPod that featured completely solid-state controls and introduced the 30-pin Dock Connector.¹

The other would change the company forever: the iTunes Music Store.

Here’s a bit from the press release:

Apple today launched the iTunes Music Store, a revolutionary online music store that lets customers quickly find, purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The iTunes Music Store offers groundbreaking personal use rights, including burning songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, listening to songs on an unlimited number of iPods, playing songs on up to three Macintosh computers, and using songs in any application on the Mac, including iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD.

“The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use and to put music on an unlimited number of iPods for on-the-go listening,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Consumers don’t want to be treated like criminals and artists don’t want their valuable work stolen. The iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution for both.”

The hour-long event is on YouTube and is a fun watch. In his keynote, Steve Jobs compared the iTunes Music Store to the other solutions of the day, touting Apple’s solution as a better way to get digital music than pirating. The Store featured high-end encoding, full-featured metadata, 30-second previews and a universe-friendly alternative to stealing.

Initially the iTunes Music Store was just on the Mac, but six months after its launch, it was made available for Windows:

Apple today launched the second generation of its revolutionary iTunes Music Store for both Mac and Windows users. The new iTunes Music Store offers Windows users the same online music store that Mac users love — with the same music catalog, the same personal use rights and the same 99 cents-per-song pricing. Since its launch six months ago, music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 13 million songs from the iTunes Music Store, making it the number one download music service in the world. With music from all five major music companies and over 200 independent music labels, the iTunes Music Store catalog is growing every day and will offer more than 400,000 songs by the end of October.

“The iTunes Music Store has revolutionized the way people legally buy music online, and now it’s available to tens of millions more music lovers with iTunes for Windows,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “While our competitors haven’t even come close to matching our first generation, we’re already releasing the second generation of the iTunes Music Store for Mac and Windows.”

Jobs referred to iTunes as the “best Windows app ever written,” and it was feature-for-feature the same as the Mac version. While the application’s reputation became tarnished in its later years, iTunes made using an iPod on Windows a pretty great experience, replacing the janky MusicMatch integration iPod users on Windows had been stuck with before this announcement.

Putting iTunes — and the iTunes Music Store — on Windows changed the digital media landscape forever. Apple would become the most powerful player in the music industry, then branch out to add podcasts, music videos, movies and TV shows to its digital store. It showed up on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV. When Apple launched the App Store in 2008, it was built atop the iTunes infrastructure.

iTunes is all but gone and the Store itself has been downplayed by Apple over the years, with the streaming services that Jobs railed against twenty years ago being the way the vast majority of us listen to music. Even so, there is no question that the iTunes Music Store helped Apple become the giant it is today.