Ain't no sunshine

In 2014, I wrote a story about the day Taylor Swift was gone from Spotify. I talked about a few things related to the ways in which popular communications technology and media impact American society. Eventually the story became out of date but I re-wrote the story and posted it to my new SubStack portal Communicate Your Ideas last year.

I wrote about the day in May 2003 when Marley came into the Founders Hall computer lab at school.

"Did you hear the news?" I asked him.

"What news?" he said.

"You didn't hear that Apple sold its one millionth song on the iTunes store today?"

Like many of his classmates in those days Marley loved the Napster software people used to download any song they wanted to hear without paying. As a school technology administrator I battled students who tried to install software on our network and use it to share and download music and other files.

Marley was a musician. We often had conversations about what it would be like when he grew up and tried to make a living selling his music. Little did we know Apple wouldn’t just clean up the Napster mess, they figuratively knocked it out of the ballpark.

“Hitting one million songs in less than a week was totally unexpected,” said Roger Ames, Warner Music Group’s chairman and CEO. “Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the Internet.” 

“Our internal measure of success was having the iTunes Music Store sell one million songs in the first month. To do this in one week is an over-the-top success,” said Doug Morris, Universal Music Group’s CEO. “Apple definitely got it right with the iTunes Music Store.”

And the music business rode that wave all the way to the bank. In less than 10 years Apple reached 25 billion songs sold by then selling over 21 million songs a day, churning out numbers that sounded more like the marketing cry of a fading hamburger chain.

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