“The people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do” – Steve Jobs
Opinionated Chocolate City / Warner Music artiste, CKay in a tweet said “Apple Music has completely revolutionized the industry.” The mere fact that the main actors in the music industry recognize the impact of Apple in their field is enough proof that Apple’s “Think different” brand campaign of 1997 became more than just a speech from Steve but a creed the company has successfully upheld till today.
The Trillion Dollar Question
“How did Apple do it” is a question often asked by the general public and stakeholders from different industries. How does Apple sell millions of high priced mobile phones? How did Apple get people to buy closed end PCs? Why do people want to be associated with Apple? How did Apple become the “I made it” and “bye haters” brand in Nigeria today? Answers to these questions is why Apple is the trillion dollar company that it is today. For more context on the magnitude of this trillion dollar feat – if you make one naira per minute, it will take two years to reach a million Naira. To be a billionaire, one Naira per minute will have to be made for 1900 years. Now if we apply this same measure of one naira per minute to making one trillion Naira, only just 2 million calendar years is required.
One of the trillion dollar questions i will be answering in this article is how Apple revolutionized the music industry irreversibly.
- The iPod: Although this was not the first MP3 player to come into existence, it was not a deterrent to the greatness that was to come. The Apple iPod was able to blend different useful features of MP3 players that came before it and add some more. The iPod won the heart of consumers with it’s easy-to-use interface and memory capacity able to store and shuffle through thousands of songs on one pocket sized device.
- Logic Pro: With Logic Pro, a digital audio workstation (production software) exclusively available to the Mac operating system, Apple brought the tools for music creation to the home of every Mac owner. A good number of music producers and artists we have today were properly introduced to creation of the art through the Apple software.
- Apple Music and iTunes: Apple has been able to deal a strong blow to piracy within the music industry and tangibly remunerate musicians for their creative efforts. Emerging in 2003, initially iTunes only ripped CDs into MP3 files. Overtime however, iTunes Store smartly partnered with the biggest four record labels in the world namely Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony Music and EMI. This made apple become the first online distributor dealing with the big four of the music industry. Apple further strengthened it’s hold on the digital music space with the launch of Apple Music in 2015. A streaming service that allows access to tens of thousands of songs via monthly subscriptions.
Apple was not the first to initiate any of the above listed factors of change, however as the old adage goes “it does not matter who does it first, but who does it best”.
