Amy-Mae Elliott interviewed my for this nice Mashable piece the other day. Here are some good snippets from me and from others that were interviewed:
Leander Kahney, editor of Cult of Mac and author of The Cult of iPod, sees the iPod’s primary impact in terms of the “connected device. “Gadgets are no longer stand-alone products,” Kahney says, “they connect to a range of software and online services. Think Internet TVs, stereos like Sonos, handheld gaming devices, GPS bike computers, in-car stereos, high-end watches, Internet radios, even printers — the list goes on and on — and the iPod was the first to do that...."
...Wikström says one could argue that iTunes has been more a hindrance to the industry than a help. Despite the billions of sales using the platform, the music industry has still suffered over the past decade. Did the dominant iTunes business model blind the industry to alternatives? “iTunes prolonged the industry’s dependence on the old model, and made them believe that it actually might be possible just to shift from CD to MP3, just as they had done in the past when they moved from vinyl to tape to CD,” says Wikström. “This is just speculation, but perhaps the most important impact on the music industry is that iTunes delayed the shift from a retail model based on control to what we now start to see emerge as various kinds of cloud-based retail models, such as Spotify and its peers.”
Futurist Gerd Leonhard, author of The Future of Content and co-author of The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution also sees iTunes playing a part in the decline of the music industry. “The genius of the iPod was (and still is, with the iPhone) that, while the music industry actually believed that it had found a good (i.e., closed and controlled) way to extract money from otherwise freeloading consumers, the iTunes/iPod/iPhone ecosystem became the dominant hardware solution for the consumption of free music.” |itunes / control image added by Gerd, source unknown |
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