Did the iPod Win the War?

Portable record players
Walkman
Discman
iPod

Which is the odd one out? (The iPod of course, the others use external media to provide the music.)

The end of external media
Where else can the development of portable music players go? They can only get smaller, larger capacity, different storage technology and convergence/integration. But the boundary has been crossed. The media and the device have become one. No longer do we have to lug the media with us. No records, no cassettes, no CDs.

The portable record player’s life was ended by the portable cassette player, whose life was only as good as when someone built an affordable portable device for playing “those new fangled CD thingies’, whose life would be cut short by the next music media format - would it be DVDs? Mini-discs?

But no, something else happened instead. There has been no new media. CDs are still the major form of music distribution. Yet the hottest portable music players on the market do not play them. If you were told 15 years ago that Discmans were all the rage but everyone was still buying cassette tapes, you’d think the world had gone mad.

The compact disc format - whether it be CD, DVD or mini-disc - is the end of the line for the distribution of music by external media.

With this in mind, the iPod’s dominance of the portable music market is more significant than originally perceived.

The Walkman lesson
Sony found that when the media changed, they were back to square one. When the media changed, the race was on to produce the best player for that media. The Discman is a case in point being no where near as ubiquitous as the Walkman. When people bought CD’s they needed a new player but they weren’t tied into their previous one. They didn’t have to buy a Discman just because they had a Walkman. Hence the media change started a new market.

The iPod doesn’t face this problem. There will be no new media to start a new market. In fact, because Apple has made it a little difficult to play music bought from iTMS on other players, existing iPod owners will be more inclined to buy iPods - no matter what form factor they take - shuffle, mini, photo, nano, ROKR, implant etc.

There’s a lot of talk about iPod being unseated by the next big thing. But unlike previous devices whose downfall was brought about by the evolution of the media, the iPod is not under this threat. Even if the future is an implanted chip with all your music downloadable to it, it can still be an iPod.

But is the market now closed? No but provided Apple keeps pace with the evolution of portable music, they should continue to dominate the market. The market now though can only be won or lost on two things - the hardware and the music format.

On these Apple are currently fairly safe. Firstly the iPod has quality and design on its side, so the hardware side of it is under control. Secondly, Apple control the format and while they dominate the market they can. But as they found with the Mac - and IBM with the PC - you can dominate a market yet still lose it if you’re not careful.

The transmutation of recorded music
The iPod was by no means the first digital music player. That credit goes to Eiger Labs with a flash based device - ironic considering Apple’s early reluctance to enter the flash market. According to WikiPedia, The first non-mechanical digital audio player on the American market was the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, a 32MB portable that appeared in the summer of 1998.

And the iPod wasn’t the first hard disk based player either, as Wikipedia says: At the end of 1999, a company called Remote Solutions made a significant improvement in DAPs’ space limitations by utilizing a laptop hard drive for song storage rather than low-capacity flash memory. The Personal Jukebox (PJB-100) had 4.8GB of storage space, which held about 1200 songs (or 100 CDs, hence the name PJB-100)

The MPMan signaled such a fundamental shift, that it is a struggle to find the right word. Evolution is steps. Transmutation is a better word and in biology means changing from one species to another, or in physics, from one element to another. But the change to portable music from recorded media players to media-less digital players was bigger than that. That change was to portable music what monkeys dropping from the trees and saying “Strewth! we’re naked!” was to humankind.

In transportation terms, this shift to media-less portable music, is as significant as switching to a vehicle that consumes no fuel.

Apple - the iPod’s biggest threat
Hopefully that puts the significance of that little white player’s success into perspective. But it means Apple’s greatest threat is themselves. There is nothing the competitors can now do to wipe out the iPod’s marketshare, short of a total and united revolution by the music industry against Apple.

Thus Apple in its position of dominance have more power than ever imagined. If they wield it wisely and learn the most important lesson from the original Mac (and that IBM learned with the PC) - that a position of dominance can be lost - then they could just grow up to be mega-corporation of many interests, not just computers and music players.