The iPod has been a phenomenal success for Apple, leading the field in the rapid consumer take-up of DAPs (digital audio players). This has subsequently fed into the growth of PMPs (portable media players), which are capable of a broader range of multimedia functions and have been on the market since 2005 (these include a number of iPod models, such as the iTouch), and more recently the multimedia mobile phone, most famously embodied in Apple's iPhone (launched in 2007). In 2006, the iPod was estimated to account for 76 per cent of global DAP and PMP sales, and in April 2007 it was announced that Apple had sold over 100 million items, making it the fastest selling music player in the business. Why has it been such a success? In this article, I try to account for some of the reasons why the DAP, in particular, has proved so popular and the issues that its use has generated. I also look into why the iPod has conquered the DAP market so successfully, to the extent that the iPod itself is now synonymous with the DAP (and PMP), even though it is only a particular brand of such a player (similar to how the Walkman, which was a brand of personal stereo, generally came to refer to personal stereos in general).
The success of the iPod is reflected not only in its name referring to DAPs and PMPs generally, but also through the prevalence of the term ‘podcasting'. Podcasting is a name given to any type of audio content that can be downloaded from the Internet manually or, more often, automatically via software applications such as ‘ipodder'. Its name reflects how it is suited to being downloaded onto mobile audio devices (it is often in MP3 format) though it need not be played in this way. According to Richard Berry, the term can be traced back to an article by the British journalist Ben Hammersley in early 2004. The increasing mobility of global populations is one of the major contexts within which to place the rise of portable media. With the development of the railway system in the nineteenth century, people were able to move across terrain with more ease, and in line with this, the portable book emerged for reading on journeys, while the book and newspaper stand became a regular feature at the station. Throughout the twentieth century, as more forms of transportation have emerged and as travelling has increased, so newer mobile media technologies have materialized, which include the car radio, the transistor radio, the portable computer, the hand-held video game and the cell phone or mobile phone.
These mobile media forms are an important historical tradition within which to place the personal stereo, or the Walkman, which was the most important mobile precedent of the iPod. Sony's Walkman, a cassette player small enough to carry around on the move, and connected to headphones, was introduced in 1979 and was an unexpected success. The growth of people adopting the Walkman (or a different brand of personal stereo) was so great that it constituted a social phenomenon and gave rise to extensive critical opinion. The fact that people could now move around and constantly be connected to music of their choosing was seen as significant. Previously, portable radios and cassette players enabled this function, but they were socially intrusive to the extent that they disrupted public space through enforcing one's sounds on others. Personal stereos enabled the listener to remain cocooned in their own sound world. This led critics to lament the ways in which people were becoming cut off from their social surroundings and locked in their own private audio bubbles. This tended to overlook the fact that in the Victorian era the book was itself used as a kind of shield on the train to ‘cope with new speeds as well as the embarrassment of sitting in an enclosed compartment with strangers'.
Less censorious analysts focused on the new relations that the Walkman brought into play between, for example, the private and the public, or the ways in which Walkman users enjoyed a new sense of empowerment by aestheticizing journeys through urban (or country) environments. Private and public demarcations, while never entirely stable, were nevertheless complicated further by the Walkman user being able to carry their private audio worlds into public space. The sense of control over everyday life has been expressed by both analysts and Walkman users: users, for example, have often expressed how the Walkman opens up a fantasy world in which they sometimes feel like they are part of a filmic experience. Hosokawa has argued that the Walkman creates a kind of ‘secret theatre', an imaginative, private space for the user that is nevertheless signalled to others who are unaware of its content. The Walkman was also seen as important for the manner by which it took music from its previously common settings and recreated the environment upon which it became nomadically superimposed, thus altering the ‘given coherence of the city-text'.
In this sense, anonymous social spaces could be audibly inscribed with personal meanings and rendered intimate. Since the advent of the Walkman, there have been a number of different variations on the mobile cassette player, including the Discman and the MD Walkman, though these did not have the impact of the original tape-based mechanism. Portable DAPs first appeared on the market in 1998, though at this time music storage space was limited and stored on an external flash drive rather than an internal hard drive. While some early models were quite popular, DAPs were controversial because it was believed (by the record industry) that they encouraged illegal downloading. By the end of the 1990s, DAPs were capable of storing music on internal hard drives and this was the beginning of their ability to store large amounts of music files (around 5GB at this point). In 2001, the Apple iPod was launched, which eventually became the market dominator, as opposed to the more established Sony. The reasons as to the massive success of Apple in this area are numerous, but there are some factors that stand out: design, usability, advertising and the launch, in 2003, of the Apple iTunes store. The actual technical production of the player was designed by the company PortalPlayer, who were hired to work on the creation of the iPod, with Apple contributing demands regarding the look, feel and operability of the device. Apple had already built a reputation in design and usability with its Macintosh computers. When the iPod was launched, it was notable for its slimline design and its central scroll wheel (soon replaced with a click wheel), which made it easy for users to find and arrange music.
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