I feel that too many recent posts on the blog have been out rightly slating Apple/iTunes and as such I would like to instead look at what iTunes and the iPod did in a positive way for the music fans and the music business alike from launch through to its current incarnation in the iPhone. The first iTunes was released into our fair world – the US in 2003 and Europe in June 2004. The music industry was beginning to see large fault lines in its core revenue streams of physical CD sales due primarily to P2P and the likes of Napster.

The music industry was also determined to kill the only real innovation of the time in terms of sharing between music fans. Instead of coming up with a way to monetise P2P and gain access to the incredible marketing data that it could provide them with, the music business attempted to kill off human nature. Obviously they failed!

Apple launched its core consumer friendly digital music-retailing outlet named iTunes so it could provide a place for consumers who purchased its iPod digital music player hardware to easily purchase music. Lets be fair it was iTunes and its incredible user experience/interface, which helped to drive legal online music sales and it still outshines any competitor on the market in terms of UI to this day.

Albeit the first release was burdened with restrictive DRM, which the labels soon decided to drop in favour of less restrictive accounting only DRM. By this time version two of iTunes was released. However, Apple/iTunes was unwilling to “open up” its player DRM to enable users to easily transfer music between devices.

By this time Napster had become legal, eMusic was on the scene and the online digital retailing market was beginning to look interesting, albeit iTunes had an above 80% market share. With over 400 stores competing for less then 11%  (when eMusic’s 9% market share is accounted for) of the market obviously there were casualties.

Move forward to Apples willingness to open up to MP3 (al la EMI 2007) and thereby allowing users to move their music to competing players. However, some will say Apple opened up a little late on the core interoperability issues in respect of its own in-house device DRM. By the time Apple came to the table on this issue the labels had become more determined to open their catalogues DRM free to everyone but iTunes. Was apple late to the party? Perhaps, but only time will tell. But with consumers/music fans always stating that wanted freedom of use, I would state that both apple and the music industry were slow to open up.

The launch of the iPhone heralded a new dynamic front on the Apple/iTunes music-retailing proposition. Yes the first generation iPhone had bugs and so does the 2nd generation version. However, Apple once again led the pack in terms of user experience, device UI in the ultra competitive mobile handset space. The launch of Nokia’s Comes With Music service and the 5800 handset last week does provide a dynamic insight into where the competitive landscape is moving.

The Nokia proposition forges a new path of all you can eat subscription inclusive of ownership after subscription that will shake-up current digital music sales propositions. How this will affect Apple/iTunes/iPhone is any ones guess. Yet what it does offer is an interesting insight into the future in terms of music consumption propositions. I need to reserve judgment on the Nokia 5800 handset as I only had a few minutes to play around with it at the Comes With Music launch last week.

Lets wait and see what Apple comes back with. Apple is and generally has been the leader in terms of UI and user experience in terms of intuitiveness and ability to set the standard that all others are judged by in terms of both hardware and software offerings.  I will never ever agree to it being right that one company has an average 75% global share in terms of digital music retailing.

On the flip side, I will never discount a company in terms of its continuous innovation and ability to properly test its products before releasing them on the market – unlike Microsoft, which is quite willing to release products with over 64,000 bugs and still expects the public to pay outrageous prices for it.

On a final note I do believe that Apple needs to come up with a viable proposition within the emerging market’s as that is where all the growth is occurring  – not in our western traditional markets. Currently Apples iPhone proposition poses too high an entry barrier to make headway in these key emerging markets. This needs to change in the short terms if Apple wants to have a serious part to play in those markets over the medium to long-term.

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