
In a way, the service hastened the revolution that record executives feared the most – it shifted the business from expensive, high-revenue CDs to cheap, low-revenue singles. In its first week, iTunes sold one million downloads and soon became not only the top online music retailer but, displacing Walmart and Best Buy, the top music retailer. (The RIAA would begin suing its customers later that year for copyright infringement, but that’s another story.) This was the moment digital music was no longer for thieves and miscreants – it was for cool people.
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The iPod suddenly had incredible power, and its white earbuds looked perfect in the “Silhouettes” ads Apple spent millions putting on TV and billboards. CDs had been available for more than 20 years, but consumers had been demonstrating since Napster’s 1999 debut that they were ready for a format change. The iTunes Music Store opened April 28th, 2003, and it was an instant revolution. They allowed him to price every song for 99 cents. He allowed some digital rights management, a key point for the labels, although it wasn’t as strict as they would have preferred.
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With a series of dramatic presentations showcasing the iTunes interface, Jobs won over Warner executives, then moved on to the other big labels, including Universal and Sony. “What Steve was doing with iTunes was to replicate that type of experience – a vast catalog, available on a singles basis, with a convenient interface. “The attraction of Napster was not just that it was free, but more importantly, it gave people a way to connect with pretty much any piece of music,” he continues. “I remember thinking, ‘This is so simple. “It was going to be their storefront, the first thing that consumers saw,” says Vidich, today an advisor and board member for several tech companies, including ReverbNation. Jobs arrived at Warner and showed Vidich and a small group of Warner employees a beta version of iTunes. By this point, Apple had already hatched the iTunes Music Store and synced it perfectly with a piece of hardware that begged for content: the iPod.


and Linkin Park, and wound up on the phone with Paul Vidich, a vice president. He began with Warner Music, home of Neil Young, R.E.M. He began to contact executives at the major record labels, some of whom were arriving at the same conclusion: music downloading could be piracy, sure, but it was also impossible to ignore, a crucial new way of doing business.
