Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/October 23

Today in 2001 the iPod was introduced, a very successful flagship product from Apple. Music was moving to hard drives. Together with the accompanying iTunes software, it brought convenient accessibility for large music collections to the masses. Users had tasted the feel of having all the music they could ever listen to at their fingertips. After Napster and its progeny the genie was out of the bottle and a startled music industry was fighting a futile fight to turn back the clock. 2003 the system was complemented by the iTunes Store, a legal music download service that profited from criminalization campaigns of the industry to scare file-sharing users. The iPod created a market for music on the Internet, paved the way for the Open Music Model, for Spotify and the like. Users gladly surrendered control over their music consumption and settled for (industry-controlled) access rather than more self-determined ownership of music files.