iTunes celebrates a decade, faces new challenges

NEW YORK — When Apple launched its iTunes music store a decade ago amid the ashes of Napster, the music industry — reeling from the effects of online piracy — was anxious to see how the new music service would shake out.

 

"The sky was falling, and iTunes provided a place where we were going to monetize music and in theory stem the tide of piracy. So, it was certainly a solution for the time," said Michael McDonald, who co-founded ATO Records with Dave Matthews and whose Mick Management roster includes John Mayer and Ray LaMontagne.

 

The iTunes music store became much more than a solution; it changed how we consume music and access entertainment. It's not only music's biggest retailer, it also dominates the digital video market, capturing 67 percent of the TV show sale market and 65 percent of the movie sale market, according to information company NPD group. Its apps are the most profitable, it has expanded to books and magazines, and it is now available in 119 countries. This week, iTunes posted a record $2.4 billion in revenue in first-quarter earnings.

 

"They revolutionized the retail landscape by making a truly interactive and very user-friendly space and platform, and they managed to do it by keeping a great music experience attached to what was very difficult technology," said Scott Borchetta, head of Big Machine Records, home to Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts. "They made it very easy to buy music digitally, and that's why I think they've run so quickly in the lead for that space and continue to dominate the space."

 

But as iTunes celebrates its 10-year mark Sunday, it faces renewed scrutiny on how it will continue to dominate in the next decade — or whether it can. With competition from subscription services like Spotify and other services like Amazon.com, Netflix, Hulu and others, iTunes will likely need to reinvent itself to remain at the top of the digital entertainment perch.

 

Apple Inc.'s Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Internet software and services, refused to comment on reports that the company will launch a radio service or some other service to compete with Spotify.

 

"We've been able to add and expand and do a lot of things to make the product even that much better," said Cue, who was integral to the creation of iTunes. "Why it's going to be great for the next 10 years is because people still want access and want more of what's available today."

 

At first only available to Mac users, iTunes debuted two years after Apple's groundbreaking iPod. With a catalog of 200,000 songs — compared with tens and tens of millions of songs available today — iTunes entered an industry being upended by illegal downloading yet still skeptical of the new music store.

 

There were more than grumbles when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs set parameters making all songs available at a cap of 99 cents (today, songs can cost up to $1.29) and giving listeners more control of what they could do with music collection in terms of portability and ownership.

 

"In the case of the labels, we felt and we were able to convince them that we had a business proposition that would be better for them in the long term, and gave them an opportunity to compete with piracy," Cue recalled.

 

"So our message to them was the only way to beat piracy wasn't lawsuits or TV ads or anything, but to actually offer what was available through piracy and people would actually pay for it if you did that. So we had to get them to all agree. As part of that, you had to get them to agree to all of the same rights."

 

Some in the industry grumbled about having to accept Jobs' rules; some still do (while digital sales rise, album sales have decreased and the industry's profits have continued to drop over the decade).

 

"To me, it's been one of the biggest assets to the music business in the last 10 years, but you'll hear from the labels that Steve Jobs ruined the music business," McDonald said.