Quote:
Originally Posted by jehane
[2] Ironically iPods were released to the Australian market about a year or so before an Australian iTunes store was opened, which begs the question of where they thought customers were getting their music...
|
In the US, too.
The assumption (and reality) was that *most* users of the early media players would be using the gadgets to supplement their PCs and Home Stereo systems--not replacing them--and thus would be buying their music on CDs and transcoding the songs to MP3/WMA/AAC. (The things go back to the last century and dialup internet access so the widespread piracy of the Napster heyday is a bit more recent.)
Once Apple decided to get into the gadget business they decided they needed to get an installed base of gadgets in place *before* they could convince the media companies to let them sell the music. So they introduced the iPod in Oct 2001 but the iTunes store didn't go live until 2003, 18 moths worth of sales later.