We all love to think “what if…”
What if Napster had managed to get its legal issues resolved? Would there be a Spotify now? What ecosystem would have emerged?
Last week I listened to a podcast interview between Tim Ferriss and Tony Fadell (“the father of the iPod”). They went into a piece of music tech history I wasn’t familiar with. Turns out iTunes launched as a somewhat re-engineered version of a startup’s software Apple acquired. This startup was called SoundJam and they had made some music software that would run on Macs, and could sync libraries with Rio music players. There’s a screenshot of it below and it kind of reminds me of WinAmp which I avidly used until Spotify came around. Note the chrome UI element which was characteristic for iTunes for a long time.
But there was another company Spotify was looking into acquiring. They were called Panic and developed a player named Audion. Also similar to WinAmp, it was more feature-rich than SoundJam and counted skins and visualizations among its features.
Audion didn’t end up getting acquired by Apple, because they never ended up meeting. The Audion team was already in talks with AOL and wanted to bring them together with Apple for a meeting. That meeting got canceled when AOL couldn’t make it, and that was the end of that.
The team behind SoundJam became the first developers to work on iTunes and after being lead developer for iTunes, one of SoundJam’s creators is now Apple’s VP of consumer applications.
Every product has a philosophy behind it and sometimes this philosophy can change the interfaces of a whole space. Look at how Tinder changed dating with its left-right swipe interface: not only a newcomer like Bumble decided to go for that, but so did the incumbent OkCupid. Or take Snapchat and the way its format influenced Instagram Stories and TikTok. This happens in music too, where some of the biggest influences can be traced back to IRC and Napster.
I think iTunes’ legacy is playlists. It really put the playlist front and center, which later on was also at the base of early Spotify. Spotify initially had no way to save artists or albums: you could star tracks and drag stuff into playlists. That was it.
It makes me so curious: if Apple had acquired Audion instead of SoundJam, would iTunes have been playlist-centric? Would the unbundling of the album have come about in the same way? Would we have the same type of ‘playlist economy’ as we see now?
If you’re curious to see what iTunes looked like upon launch, here’s a video of Steve Jobs demoing it (from 4:32 – excuse the pixels, we’re digging deep into YouTube’s archives):
Another obscure bit of Apple / iTunes history: watch Steve Jobs present the Motorola iTunes phone.