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When Apple in 2000 quickly shifted its focus to music
If you pay attention to the cynics out there, Apple's $3.2 billion acquisition of Beats reeks of desperation. Apple, the argument goes, completely missed the boat on streaming music and is now just grasping at straws with Beats in a last ditch effort to reclaim musical relevancy. Some even take things further, arguing that Apple's acquisition of Beats is nothing more than a lame attempt to up the company's cool factor. In truth, Apple's acquisition of Beats reflects highly on Tim Cook and Apple's executive team insofar that it underscores the company's tacit admission that 1) the music industry is changing drastically and rapidly and 2) that previous efforts to fight subscriptions with iTunes Radio and various iTunes exclusives just aren't enough. Sure, Apple could have been more in tune with the rise of Spotify. And sure, iTunes Radio was a bit too little too late. But Apple's strength doesn't lie in its ability to never make a mistake, but rather in its ability to recognize mistakes and completely change course when necessary. So it goes with subscription music, a service Steve Jobs spoke of derisively for years on end. Apple today can't ignore the growing impact of streaming services and it's going all in with its largest corporate acquisition to date. Notably, this isn't the first time the company has pulled an about-face rather suddenly. Indeed, Apple's first foray into music with iTunes and the iPod is in some ways analagous to Apple's Beats acquisition. Philip Elmer-DeWitt referenced this a few weeks ago, directing us to an interesting and informative podcast from Ben Thompson of Stratechery. The year was 1999. Steve Jobs was on stage at Macworld introducing the latest iMac with Firewire, Quicktime and iMovie. He told the faithful that iMovie was going to be to the Mac what desktop publishing had been 15 years earlier. Internally, the whole company -- hardware, software, marketing -- was aligned with making Macs the best computers for making home movies. Fast forward 14 months and Jobs is on stage telling the faithful he has a new vision for the Mac. It's called the Digital Hub, and it's going to start not with movies but with music. Notably, Thompson (as a graduate business student) spent a summer as an intern at Apple University where he studied this particular strategy shift in detail, talking to a number of the key people involved in the process. According to Thompson, the rise of Napster caught Jobs off guard and had him scared that the company might have missed the boat on music entirely. "It was one of the scariest moments of Jobs' comeback at Apple", Thompson explained. "He realized, 'Crap! This ought to be Apple's domain.'" "So Apple completely changed everything," Thompson added. "They took all these people off of iMovie. They reorganized everyone. All the stars from iMovie got demoted. There was a ton of internal upheaval... and they went out and bought SoundJam. They didn't have time to build their own. The market need was so pressing they went out and bought something and adapted it." The end result, of course, was an incredible string of successes. The iPod was released in 2001 and once it became Windows compatible in 2003, the entire digital music industry exploded with Apple reaping the bulk of the profits and acclaim. It remains to be seen how Apple plans to integrate Beats Music into the fold, but if history is any indication, Apple never succeeds by being the first, but by being the best.
Behind the music: the backstory of Marimba 158, the iPhone text tone
In a fascinating post from Kelly Jacklin, the long time Apple software engineer details how he helped create the default text alert sound on the iPhone -- now known as the "Tri-tone" alert. The history of the the pleasant chime we've all come to know and love stretches all the way back to 1998, nearly 10 years before the iPhone ever hit store shelves. Back in 1998, Jeff Robbin, Bill Kincaid and Dave Heller began working on an MP3 player for the Mac called SoundJam MP. If the name sounds vaguely familiar, it's because Apple famously acquired SoundJam MP in 2000 and quickly repurposed it into the first version of iTunes. But in 1999, before an Apple acquisition was on the horizon, Jeff Robbin asked Jacklin if he could come up with a sound to alert a user when a CD burning session was complete. Being a hobbyist musician, Jacklin was up to the task, and he got to work experimenting with various sounds. I was looking for something "simple" that would grab the user's attention. I thought a simple sequence of notes, played with a clean-sounding instrument, would cut through the clutter of noise in a home or office. So I had two tasks: pick an instrument, and pick a sequence of notes. Simple, right? Yeah, says you; everyone's an armchair musician... I was really into the sound of marimbas and kalimbas at the time, so I thought I'd try both of those. I also went through bank (after bank) of sounds built into the SW1000XG, auditioning instrument sounds, and found three other instrument sounds that I liked: a harp, a koto (Japanese zither), and a pizzicato string sound (that's the sound a violinist makes when plucking the string, rather than bowing it). Jacklin recalls that he wanted a simple sound, which meant that many of the sounds he experimented with were just three of four notes long. For all you music buffs out there, Jacklin also mentions that he wanted the sound to have a happy vibe, so he particularly experimented with "notes from the major scale, focusing on I, III, IV, V, and VIII" octaves. If you'd like the full nitty-gritty as to how Jacklin came up with a plethora of note permutations to choose from, the full article is a must read. But suffice it to say, Jacklin ultimately settled upon a winner, a sound file he called 158-marimba.aiff. As initially intended, the sound did indeed become the default sound when a disc burning session in Soundjam MP concluded. When Apple transformed Soundjam MP into iTunes, the sound remained part of the app. Jumping ahead a few years to the iPhone's release in 2007, Jacklin was pleasantly surprised when he discovered that the sound he created many years earlier continued to live on, this time in the form of the default text alert. So imagine my surprise when the iPhone ships, and the default text message tone is... "158-marimba", now going by the clever (and not actually accurate, from a music theory perspective) name "Tri-Tone". Time goes by, and this sound becomes iconic, showing up in TV shows and movies, and becoming international short-hand for "you have a text message"... Wow! Who'd have thought? Indeed, I myself have noticed, while watching TV with friends, that when the "Tri-tone" sound happens to be played in a scene, a number of people reach for their pockets to see if they have a message. Again, Jacklin's full write-up is worth checking out. As an added and extremely interesting bonus, Jacklin's post includes an audio file comprised of sounds he experimented with that didn't quite make the cut. [Ed. note: It has come to our attention that blockquotes are not working on the mobile version of the site (m.tuaw.com) and may distort this story, particularly for those reading on the iPad via the Facebook app. We are working on a fix and apologize for the inconvenience.]
The ever-growing iTunes basket
The Guardian puts to words something I've been thinking for a long time: that iTunes is actually Apple's weakest link. You'd be forgiven for believing the opposite -- iTunes is arguably Apple's strongest brand, given that it encompasses all of the "mobile device company's" products, and remains the springboard for all iPhones, iPods, and iPads, even across into Windows-land. I'm sure there are even non-Apple customers that use iTunes to organize and share their music. So, there's no question that iTunes is a powerful component of Apple's success so far. But at the same time, it's become a crutch. As John Naughton says, this is "feature creep on an heroic scale." The application was started as SoundJam, meant specifically for music playback, but at this point, iTunes serves as a movie and TV rental service, a music recommendation service, a phone activation service, the largest mobile software platform in the world, a contact sync app, a media sharing app, an e-book marketplace, a podcasting service, backup software, and oh yeah, now it's the home base for what's supposed to be a scalable music-based social network. When you think about it that way, the new logo wasn't nearly different enough. Apple's walking a tightrope here -- on the one hand, why not put all of your eggs in the basket that's free to download and easy to use? Why not allow the piece of software everyone has to do everything you want everyone to do? It's a Trojan horse writ large -- give the software away, and sell the hardware that works with it. But on the other hand, the name "iTunes" doesn't stand for half of what that app does these days, and anyone who's ever tried to organize or update a couple hundred apps from within iTunes itself knows that there must be a better way. [via Cult of Mac]
A walk through iTunes history
Recognize the software above? The brushed steel, the rounded buttons, the liquid digital-style display. If you said SoundJam, you're right. But if you said iTunes, you're right, too -- SoundJam is the app that Apple originally bought to turn into the multimedia/handheld software juggernaut we know today. This is the first (public) iteration of the software, as told in this interesting history of iTunes over at Mac|Life. The program actually started as a Winamp-style (oh man, remember Winamp? Justin Frankel's now doing stuff with Reaper, which is the app artists will use to release their songs in Rock Band. But I digress...) media management application, and it's really interesting to see how it turned into a real keystone of Apple's media plans over the years, from the "Rip. Mix. Burn." idea to the home base for the iPhone, up into the current iTMS (complete with music, movies, TV shows and even audiobooks) and of course the game-changing App Store. If you'd told the SoundJam guys that their software would one day revolutionize the music and smartphone industries, not to mention be at the center of a multimillion dollar software delivery system, they'd probably have told you to keep dreaming. And we're only at version 9. Who knows what we'll see in the next ten years of iTunes?
