Apple also undertook a sustained advertising push to promote the iPod, which became particularly marked around 2003. Using simple, yet striking, adverts - often featuring a silhouette dancing against a coloured background with iPod in hand - television, magazine and billboard adverts became ubiquitous. Apple skilfully targeted a core youth audience through use of music accompanying the television advertisements: the three original advertisements featured hip-hop, garage and techno music, respectively, which were the three best selling genres at the time. Its public relations (PR) division also went into overdrive, securing around 6,000 iPod and iTunes stories within major publications worldwide by the end of 2003. The company also forged lucrative partnerships with other companies such as Volkswagen and Pepsi. Apple was able to fit the product into its general brand image, in which the purchasing of an Apple product was seen as a lifestyle choice, associated with ‘hipness', leisure and elegance. By contrast, Sony only really began to build up a sustained advertising campaign for its DAPs in 2004, at which point it was generally considered too late. Meanwhile, Apple had already captured a majority of this expanding market.
The launch of the iTunes store was another factor in Apple's huge success with the iPod. As previously mentioned, the record industry was expressing some concern about DAPs due to issues of piracy. With the iTunes store, Apple established links with many major record companies to provide a legal, downloadable service. The timing of the launch of iTunes music store was also important: it was released in the USA in April 2003 and in France, Germany and the UK in June 2004 (by which time it was PC-compatible), to be closely followed by its launch in numerous other countries. This era coincided not only with prevalent iPod advertising, but also with the real growth of an online legal music market. While many were still downloading illegal files, others wanted to enter the virtual music world in a less risky manner. The iTunes store, as Kelly has pointed out, guarantees a standard technical quality (which illegal downloading cannot), is ‘safe' to use and can also definitely be transferred to, and played on, an iPod. This latter consistent connection was important as not all music files could be played on all DAPs. In this sense, the iTunes store may have helped to sell the iPod and vice versa, hence the fact that the store has dominated digital music sales in a similar manner to the player dominating DAP sales. In light of the huge rise in the consumption of iPods and other DAPs, analyses of the changing ways music is being experienced are again materializing. From one perspective, the iPod does not seem to be a particularly radical progression from the Walkman: the mobility of individuals through public space, who can nevertheless remain connected to a private audio realm, remains constant. Yet, even if the ubiquity of the iPod does not constitute a drastic break from the phenomenological states associated with the Walkman, there are important differences between the two devices. First, the growth of large hard drives to store music on has led to the increased portability of music. With the Walkman, one had a portable device but often had to choose a very limited amount of music to carry around because each 60-90 minutes of music had to be stored on a single cassette. This sometimes led to people spending quite a bit of time actually mulling over what music they should take with them on each particular outward excursion.
In contrast, the iPod allows people to store a huge amount of music on a tiny device without any supplemental material. The size of hard drives differs according to each model, but most devices have the space to store vast amounts of music. Many iPod users have enthused about the way in which it is possible to take their entire record collections with them on the go. Thus, physical restrictions become increasingly overcome due to the virtual nature of digital music, and this allows a greater degree of mobile choice. This, in a sense, gives people greater control of their private sounds in public space. Previously, Walkman users had spoken of how they would create specific tapes to take with them on journeys to create a nomadic ‘mood'. Yet, this would need to be planned in advance; if the chosen tape(s) did not, as anticipated, match the mood, this sense of ‘control' may have dissipated. With the iPod, the huge amount of music at one's disposal allows users to match mood and music off the cuff, so to speak. This ‘off-the-cuff' quality of the iPod is a result not only of its storage capacity, but also because its digital nature affords users to programme, randomize and skip tracks. In this sense, the device is like a portable jukebox. People can listen to entire albums on the move, they can listen to assembled ‘playlists' (akin to a compilation tape), or they can let the player select tracks at random. This latter function has given pleasure to some users, who tend to enjoy the mixture of surprise (you don't know what's coming next) and control (it's going to be a track that you've put on there and if you don't want to listen to it at that moment then you can skip it). The random function can also give rise to unanticipated moods in the user. Dan Laughey has described how a student who he interviewed experienced a ‘strange' mixture of feelings as he listened to a set of random tracks from his collection, some of which were 10 years old. He ‘experienced odd feelings of happiness, regret, anger and embarrassment as he recalled songs that were attached to memories of particular events and episodes in teenage years'.
In this sense, the iPod takes the personalization of the Walkman into new territory. First, it can aid the customization of music to fit the current mood of the individual, who can flick through tracks at will and ‘fit' the music to the current mood. Second, the user can give up a degree of control and let the random function inject a level of surprise, which may produce particular moods sparked by memory, as the sequence of songs connect with emotions buried deep within the individual. One final important difference between the iPod and the Walkman is that the latter was almost uniformly used as an ‘in-between-device'; that is, it was used on journeys between destination points. The iPod may be used as a mobile device but it is also used in a number of other settings: at home, in the car (it can be fitted into car stereos), and at work. It can be plugged into other machines with ease while its capacity, as well as its randomizing and programmable functions, make it ideal to play anywhere. At home, for example, it offers more flexibility than a CD in terms of programming one's entire collection into a coherent sequence of songs that one is in the mood for. In this sense, its status as a kind of personalized mobile jukebox is suited to customized listening within a variety of contexts. If the Walkman was a gadget that blurred the divisions between the private and the public, it was nevertheless only used in public settings in order to render them more personal. The iPod, however, is a device that can be used in both personal and public settings in order to enhance the individual's audio experience. While Apple has certainly been dominant in the DAP and PMP markets, it is by no means guaranteed that this will always be the case.
Sony and Creative, in particular, are attempting to compete in the market. Apple's success, meanwhile, is not always met with consumer satisfaction and the gap between hype and reality has led to many complaints about faulty iPods. Retail analysts Olswang have reported that ‘iPod owners are twice as likely to have had to ask for a repair to their player, than owners of other brands'. Nevertheless, such complaints have yet to dent Apple's market dominance; the likelihood of Windows - whose Zune player was launched in the USA in November 2006 - doing so in the near future is remote. The Zune has a relatively large screen, which makes it ideal for watching moving images on the go. Entering the PMP market at such a late stage, Microsoft is obviously gambling on the growth of portable moving image viewing. Currently, there does not seem to be the same demand for video on the move as there does music, though the future direction of PMPs is moving towards multi-functionality (and, hence, many iPods now contain video, as well as audio functions). Mobile phones have long offered multi-functionality and the fact that many people use such devices to listen to music on has forced Apple to respond. In reply, they have launched the ‘iPhone', which is a telephone, PMP, Internet device and camera, among other things. The iPhone, a characteristically sleek Apple gadget, also includes a state-of-the-art multi-touch sensing screen, which is scratch-resistant and tailored for ease of use with one's fingertips. (Apple subsequently launched the ‘iPod touch', which added the multi-touch sensitive screen and wi-fi networking capabilities to the iPod.)
Launched in the USA in June 2007 and in the UK, Germany and France in November 2007, currently, the device was in its early stages of market penetration. Inevitably, the hype underpinning its launch was so forceful that it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between advertising and reporting in relation to the product. Nevertheless, early reports and sales were generally positive, if not unanimously so. Whether the iPhone marks the stage where the DAP and PMP become significant, yet short-lived media phenomena, or whether it fails to penetrate the market in the same manner as its music-focused progenitor, remains to be seen. At which point the fog of hype currently obscuring attempts to assess the product rationally will have shifted onto a number of more modern lifestyle gadgets.
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