In 1999, Napster launched, and every song in the history of sound recording transformed into data. What was once a large PVC disc was now code—air, really. Songs in the wind. What would be the best way to carry them with us?
There were mp3 players before the iPod—they just weren’t very good. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs said the pre-iPod mp3 players on offer “truly sucked.” In 2000, a trio of former Apple software engineers wrote a Mac interface for the Rio, a homely chunk of black plastic that held 30 minutes of music and ran off a single AA battery. Their interface was called SoundJam, which Apple then acquired and retooled into iTunes. Meanwhile Jon Rubinstein, who had previously overseen the development of the delicious candy-colored late ‘90s iMacs, sourced components that would make the iPod possible: a small LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a 1.8-inch drive that could fit 1,000 songs. Designer Jony Ive had the idea to make the player white. “Most small consumer products have this disposable feel to them,” Ive said in Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs. “There is no cultural gravity to them.”
Does all “cultural gravity” come from extreme opposition, Kurt Cobain’s limp, greasy mop after a decade of crunchy, puffy hairdos? The iPod’s contrast was celebrated in iconic advertisements: pitch-black silhouettes of dancers holding snow-white iPods. The first song played publicly on an iPod was Sarah McLachlan’s “Building a Mystery,” at the launch event in 2001. A lovely song, but it smells as strongly of the 1990s as a bottle of Clinique Happy. The later iPod commercial songs signified a new kind of aesthetic for the 2000s: high energy, a touch alt, and very eclectic. Hip hop, pop, and rock scored the television spots. The hip hop came hybridized with other genres (Ozomatli, “Saturday Night”; Gorillaz, “Feel Good Inc.”). The pop was cute (Feist, “1234”) or mildly funky (Black Eyed Peas, “Hey Mama”). Rock was a little scrappy, always catchy, never too aggressive (Caesars, “Jerk It Out”, and of course, Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”). And U2 were there, as they often were for crucial American cultural resets.
A classic Apple company principle was the ability to “impute” brand identity. Mike Markkula, the first chairman of Apple’s board, described “imputing” as a way to signal to consumers what a brand valued in every aspect of their presentation—not just the product, but the way it was packaged, and the way it was marketed. The iPod marketing associated the product capability (1,000 songs in your pocket) with the obvious extension of that capability: those 1,000 songs should represent your broadest, most excellent taste.