How the iPod came to dominate MP3 Players
There is no escaping hearing all the buzz about Apple’s iPod.
The latest and greatest single item to hit the Music Scene since the Beatles.
If you haven’t been relentlessly bothered by your children to buy one,
you must have either seen an ad, or seen people wearing them around town.
The billboards are all over every urban environment.
As if Apple needs to remind you that they have the #1 Market share when it comes to music/ MP3 Players?
As of October 2004, Apple has a 90% market share of the hard drive based MP3 player market and 70% share of the MP3 player market as a whole.
An astounding domination of the market.
How they got there was a combination of vision and market ingenuity.
Apple astutely understood that the popularity of digital music was rising and there was a lack of suitable hardware for the young market. They developed a hard drive MP3 player and released it in 2001.
In addition to having just a good piece of hardware, they successfully designed the look of the iPod to attract the young audience they knew would be interested first.
It was sleek and "hip" and marketed to young, style oriented music fans. They gave it an all white look with the earplugs being especially emphasized in advertising.
Even the original iPod became very popular with the young users and kids especially wanted to be seen with their white iPod earphones on. This first iPod had a 5GB hard drive that "put a 1000 songs in your pocket".
The second generation iPod increased the storage capacity to 10GB and changed the scroll wheel from a scroll wheel to a touch sensitive one.
The original two iPods, however, were only Mac compatible. This helped the entire Apple brand to their core users, even increasing some Mactintosh sales from the iPod, but it missed the entire PC window based users.
This problem was gone forever with their 2003 release of their 3rd generation iPod that came bundled with Apple’s iTunes software and was compatible on both Macs and Windows PC’s.
The third generation iPod came in various Gigabyte sizes, from 10 to 40 GB in size.
iTunes was released April in 2003 and quickly came to dominate the music download market by allowing users to quickly and cheaply download individual song titles.
The iPod is the only portable player that can download the music and this quickly made them dominant in the online music business.
Apple has maintained their firm standing as the top seller in MP3's by releasing several different versions of the iPod.
Their main iPod is now in its fifth generation and it has been made much more compact with much larger storage. The latest model can even display color photos and movies.
iPod then came out with the mini.
It was smaller in size to the original and brilliantly marketed by adding different colors.
Blogs became cluttered with people deciding what the "best" color now was. First everyone had sought out the white brand and now the various colors became the hot topic of the day.
The mini was replaced with the Nano. The iPodNano is only .27 inches thick and weighs only 1.5 oz –an incredible 62% smaller than the mini and had color screens.
The screens however created a bit of controversy as some users said they were too fragile and damaged easily. The nano uses flash memory, There is also the iPod shuffle, another very small flash based iPod, this has a smaller capacity, and doesn’t have a display screen.
The dominance of the iPods can be seen also by how many other industries are getting on the iPod bandwagon.
Nike and Apple announced in 2006 a clothing line that will hold the nano and cars are even being designed with docking ports to help to integrate the iPod with the car sound system. Many other electrical companies are making all kinds of iPod accessories.
The iPod isn’t the only MP3 player in the market, there are several other makes and models. You wouldn’t know it by their market-share.
However, There is zero doubt amongst the “Fashionistas”.
The trendiest and most-asked-for is definitely, by leaps and bounds, the Apple iPod.