The music industry changed forever on October 23, 2001. That’s the day the little company in Cupertino, California unveiled a new way for music lovers to carry “1,000 songs in [their] pocket.” The name: iPod.
Now, the iPod wasn’t really a new idea. Understand that Apple was actually late to the MP3 dance. Three years earlier, Eiger Labs released the MPMan F10, an MP3 player created by a South Korean company. It held a whopping 32MB of audio and promised to revolutionize music. Well, it did and it didn’t. The MPMan was a bust, as was the slew of players that followed it, but the iPod was not. The iPod was a tipping point.
We all know how the music story unfolds, how few people buy CD’s anymore, how piracy and file sharing turned the music industry on its head and forced artists and labels to carve up albums into $.99 singles, and how the music industry will never be the same again. Ever.
There’s a cautionary tale in here for those of us in the publishing biz and those who want to be. Digital book publishing likely won’t be a parallel event entirely, but I think the same market forces that tossed the music industry’s tectonic plates around like will move ours as well. Forces of nature (and demographics) are impossible to stop, after all. And this time I don’t think the changes will take as long to happen. That’s a controversial position to take in my business, but I’m going to take that bet even if I’m proven wrong, which I don’t think I am. And here’s why… Continue Reading…