iTunes

The term I chose relating to the modern information society is the online music outlet, iTunes. The earliest article I could find was found through the New York Times, dating back to May of 2003. In the article " The Pop Life; Apple Finds a Route For Online Music Sales," I surprisingly found that iTunes was widely supported from its creation, whether it be from critics or from customers. In its first month, iTunes had over 3 million downloads at 99 cents per song. This is a huge amount of sales for a product that has just been released. What makes this even more astonishing is that only Macintosh computers were able to access iTunes, and less than one percent of the computers in the United States were Macintosh. Initially, one big problem arose with the introduction of iTunes - hacking the system in order to download music for free. Hackers were able to trick the iTunes system into thinking that they were the original downloaders of other's music libraries and were able to download other's music free of charge. With a revamped programming system, Apple focused on this problem and solved it. In addition to the NY Times article, I found an article using Project Muse dating back to 2005. In this article, one fascinating fact stood out to me - worldwide sales from Universal Music Group dropped 22 percent while iTunes online music sales "soared." With the rapid changes of technology, Apple found a niche that forced the thought of CDs being outdated. Today, iTunes still is a driving force within the online music industry. It has inspired other music outlets that allow you to purchase subscriptions to listen to music or stream music for free, such as Spotify. Additionally, iTunes has expanded from not only allowing its customers to download strictly music, but now has a radio outlet that rivals Pandora, an app store, a store for books and podcasts, and a store to buy or rent TV shows and movies. iTunes dove into the online music scene with a force and it continues to play an even larger role than ever.