November 6, 2003: After porting iTunes to Home windows, Apple units a brand new file for digital music gross sales: an enormous 1.5 million downloads in a single week.
Bringing the iTunes Music Retailer to PC customers opens up a brand new, profitable marketplace for Apple. The record-breaking gross sales clock in at 5 occasions greater than the 300,000 downloads that peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster achieved in its debut week (bear in mind it?). And 1.5 million is greater than double the 600,000 iTunes downloads per week Apple reported promoting to Mac customers previous to the Home windows launch.
Bringing iTunes to Home windows boosts digital music gross sales
The iTunes Music Retailer arrived on Home windows on October 16, 2003. That was a full six months after it launched on Mac. One cause for the delay? Apple CEO Steve Jobs was reluctant to finish the exclusivity of iTunes.
He advised his lieutenants on the time — Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Jeff Robbin and Tony Fadell — that each iTunes and the iPod music participant boosted Mac gross sales.
The opposite execs countered this argument by stating that declining Mac gross sales might by no means outweigh the achieve from elevated iPod gross sales. They ultimately satisfied Jobs.
“The iTunes Music Retailer has revolutionized the best way individuals legally purchase music on-line, and now it’s obtainable to tens of hundreds of thousands extra music lovers with iTunes for Home windows,” Jobs mentioned in a press launch on the launch. “Whereas our rivals haven’t even come near matching our first era, we’re already releasing the second era of the iTunes Music Retailer for Mac and Home windows.”
On account of this conflict of concepts, the primary week of iTunes on Home windows probably proved a bit tense for Apple’s prime brass. Ultimately, nevertheless, it marked a serious milestone within the continued success of iTunes.
“The unbeatable mixture of iPod and iTunes presents music lovers a seamless expertise for getting, managing and listening to their digital music collections wherever,” mentioned Jobs in a press launch marking the 1.5 million downloads milestone.
In a while, Jobs joked about giving Home windows customers entry to such an exquisite Mac app. He famously referred to as it like “giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell.”
Main development for iTunes
In 2003, Apple’s music service was rising at an astonishing charge. By March 2004, iTunes hit 50 million downloads. And by August of that yr, the iTunes Music Retailer catalog reached 1 million songs in the USA, a primary for an internet music service. It additionally racked up greater than 100 million music downloads by that point.
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Luke Dormehl is a UK-based journalist and creator, with a background working in documentary movie for Channel 4 and the BBC. He’s the creator of The Method: How Algorithms Remedy All Our Issues, And Create Extra and The Apple Revolution, each revealed by Penguin/Random Home. His tech writing has additionally appeared in Wired, Quick Firm, Techmeme, and different publications. He’d like you a large number when you adopted him on Twitter.