This world is certainly full of paradoxes. At one end of the spectrum is Apple’s iTunes, which celebrated its 10th anniversary on April 28 this year. It is certainly hard to believe — and almost certainly no one imagined it at the time of its launch in 2003 — that the service would reach its 25th billion download earlier this year, spread across 435 million iTunes account holders, by providing them access to 35 million songs, a far cry from the 200,000 songs that the service commenced with.
Much credit for the creation of this legitimate online store goes to the genesis of another online music store, born in 1999, Napster but, alas, that was illegal. With file-sharing in late 2002 peaking at 80 million users, the watchdog music body in the US — the Recording Industry Association Of America (IMI — the Indian Music Industry — is the equivalent here) — sued Napster for copyright infringement and, expectedly and deservedly, won the suit that shut Napster. Like the tentacles of an octopus, the shutting of one piracy site unfortunately gave rise to a multitude of others, and the record labels did their best within the constraints by setting up Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection to prevent copying of CDs onto recordable discs and into MP3 formats, something that could easily be shared through the internet.
Just when it was feared that there was little hope that the recording industry could monetise this new format of consumption, the late Steve Jobs made an offer to the recording industry that was really hard to refuse; let people download music, but help him make it affordable to them, and assist him in providing them close proximity for consumption i.e. on their desktops or laptops. Besides convincing industry personnel with his arguments, Jobs showed what a massive catalogue of content, available as single tracks, could do for consumers and, thus, was born iTunes.
To service/store the content, was the iPod. At 99 cents per song then (at today’s market rate, that amounts to `53), in the first week, iTunes sold a million tracks as downloads. That resulted in iTunes becoming not only the top selling online retailer but, simultaneously, iTunes had become the North America’s top music retailer too. Period.
In the ten years that iTunes made its debut, the global record industry has shrunk from US$38 million to US$16 million, and music consumption predominantly takes place on the iPhone and other handsets, as well as on tablets. However, iTunes is available in more countries than ever before, having been introduced in India in December last year, where songs are competitively priced between `7 to `15, and full albums at `70. Now, let us discuss the other end of the spectrum. The almost unheard of now format, cassettes, is making a comeback. This format, which initially ensured the demise of vinyl, a format itself that has suddenly revived and finds itself selling at a premium (in India, some of them are priced even more than Blu Ray discs), suddenly finds that several international bands/arti-stes — who are not signed to major labels — are releasing their content on cassettes. But there’s a catch to this, the number of cassettes being marketed are limited editions and further, to ensure that the musicians do not sacrifice the market that indeed has turned digital, a code is provided with the cassette to enable the purchaser to download the song(s). So what gives regarding the resurgent format?
Yes, nostalgia lives and, further, wouldn’t you like to receive your content with a colour artwork, in a casing — that used to be known as an IC box — and build a sense of pride by showing it to your friends or visitors at your home? While the target audience is certainly music buyers from a pre-internet era (yes, I admit it, like me!), nothing changes the fact that today’s generation is having an interesting time experimenting with a format that had almost ceased to exist by the time they were born. For instance, a band known as British Sea Power has placed demos on one side of the cassette, and studio recorded cuts of the same songs on the other side. For the true fan, this traces the making of the album. But, what about the availability of hardware to listen to cassettes? I used to laugh when my wife heard her religious discourses on a carefully preserved cassette-cum-radio player but now, of course, the joke is on me!
The writer has been part of the entertainment business for over 23 years, still continues to pursue his hobby, and earns an income out of it