iPod and iTunes

iPod represents the archetypical music player device (portable). An iPod can carry personal music collections anywhere, can play up to 12 hours straight, and can even store up to 5000 songs. Fire Wire and USB 2.0 technologies support the transfer of music from an entire CD to an iPod in a few of seconds.

Today's music market on portable device is currently dominated by Apples' iPod + iTunes. iPod + iTunes is offering a complete pipeline of multimedia entertainment allowing users to buy more than one million of different songs and to play them anywhere. iTunes has been one of the first successful initiatives that legally offer pay-per-download music in massively distributed contexts. The perfect marriage between iPod and iTunes provides users the opportunities for managing a digital music collection. iTunes Music Store offers to users the possibility to browse through more than 9,000 audio books. iTunes application makes also easier to quickly transfer songs, just popping a CD into a PC and clicking a button.

As a consequence of this success, modern radio stations offer to consumer an eclectic selection of music in iPod-style. Traditional way to schedule programs picks from a library of 300-400 titles with the same 30-40 songs, repeating them several time in a day. Modern radio stations, such as U.S. "Jack", for example, offer broadband diffusion of serendipitous playlists obtained by more than 1200 songs get played only once every few days. The Jack format claims that users want to hear a large selection and a variety of familiar music. Hence, Jack implements this idea in line with iPodders podcatching the last podcast. Finally, advances in the video technologies are also fueling the emergence of digital cinema.

Although music download e-commerce was happening before Apple introduced its iPOD line of mp3 players in 2001, Apple's chic devices, marketing approach, and easy to use online (legal) music download site called iTunes are widely seen as sea-change events. While iTunes gets most press, there are many other ways to legally acquire audio and music online including: Napster, Real, download.com, eMusic, Walmart.com, mp3.com, and Amazon.com. Such stores replace the 'first generation' of illegal file sharing systems which allowed users to trade high-quality versions of songs online at no cost.

Illegal file sharing ultimately led to the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) much-publicized lawsuits with individual uploaders. RIAA has thus far targeted principle sources (e.g. those users with more than 1000 songs on their hard drives) rather than casual users; however, their efforts are aimed to deter future abusers of copyrighted media.