The iPod's Moment in History

By Charlie Bertsch, Tikkun. Posted September 27, 2006.

The fall of 2001 was surely one of the worst times to launch a new "lifestyle" product in the United States since World War II. Still reeling from the shock of seeing their nation's defenses breached by foreign invaders for the first time since the War of 1812, consumers had sharply curtailed spending on luxury goods. The stock market was doing poorly. And then, just when it seemed like the country's mood was beginning to stabilize, the discovery of anthrax in the nation's postal system rekindled the fear of indiscriminate terrorism. It was under these difficult circumstances that Apple CEO Steve Jobs walked on stage on October 23 -- the same day the Patriot Act was introduced on the floor of the House -- to debut a device that could either help revive the Apple brand's mystique or hasten its slide into irrelevance. But that didn't dissuade Jobs.

"Music's a part of everyone's life," he stated, "and because it's a part of everyone's life, it's a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries." As Jobs went on to size up the market for digital music players and then announce the introduction of the iPod, these words continued to resonate, underscoring the ambitiousness of the company's strategy. "Everyone" is not a niche market. Five years later, Apple still has a long way to go before reaching that lofty goal. But the iPod has also turned out to be a bigger success than most people ever imagined. And it's become a part of modern society, affecting the lives of even those who don't actually own one.

Although the car radios that debuted in the early years of the Depression paved the way for all future efforts to take sound on the road; although the Sony Walkman cassette player, released in 1979, seemed like as big a deal in its day as the iPod does now; and although portable digital music players first appeared on the market back in 1998, the iPod's significance should not be underestimated. Because, even though it is only the latest stage in a much longer history of mobile audio, Apple has done such a thorough job of colonizing consumers' minds that many of them have now come to see that history in the company's terms. What the iPod makes possible stands in for what portability itself makes possible. That is why it has made the leap from newcomer to icon with astonishing brevity and is now close to attaining the lexical status of "Xerox" and "Kleenex."

It is impossible to make sense of the contemporary culture industry without putting the iPod center stage. Even those music lovers who have no interest in using one, either because they are unsatisfied with its limited fidelity or because they aren't interested in mobility, must confront the fact that the choices available to them are constrained by the iPod's influence on the market. Indeed, the very existence of traditional audiophiles is threatened, since the criteria they use for rating both equipment and recording are no longer a high priority for most listeners. Frequency response, the accuracy of microphones, the virtuosity of musicians -- the bread and butter of "serious" music magazines from the late 1940s until the popularization of the MP3 format -- have become secondary or tertiary considerations in a context where the most important thing is not how good the music sounds, but how readily it is available to you.

Significantly, when Jobs introduced the iPod back in 2001, he went out of his way to make it clear that Apple was appealing to the casual listener. "The biggest thing about iPod is that it holds 1,000 songs," he noted. "Now this is a quantum leap, because for most people it's their entire music library." Since that first iPod only held five gigabytes of music, barely more than today's much smaller iPod Nano, the presumption that the device could hold everything in a person's music library clearly overlapped with Jobs's earlier comment that, "music is a part of everyone's life." When you're marketing to everyone, you're interested in what works for "most people" instead of what works best for the people who care most.

This brings us back to the apparent ill-timing of the product's debut. As Apple's recent financial fortunes make clear, the fall of 2001 may actually have been the best time to introduce this particular "lifestyle" product. The news stories that were surely a distraction for Jobs's audience that day contributed to a mood that made the iPod seem like the perfect technology for the moment. Because, as his presentation made clear, what the iPod's combination of speed and size was really intended to make possible was the transformation of music into shelter. The prospect of bringing your whole music library with you is only attractive if circumstances prevent you from hearing it at home.

Charlie Bertsch is Tikkun's music editor and assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona. A co-editor of Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, Bertsch is currently putting the final touches on a book about punk.

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