November 6, 2003: After porting iTunes to Windows, Apple sets a new record for digital music sales: a massive 1.5 million downloads in one week.
Bringing the iTunes Music Store to PC users opens up a new, lucrative market for Apple — and blows away
Bringing iTunes to Windows boosts digital music sales
Apple CEO Steve Jobs wanted the iPod to change the way people listened to music. But to make that happen, he had to make peace with the millions of people who didn’t own a Mac. Bringing iTunes to Windows meant opening Apple’s carefully guarded ecosystem to its biggest rival — a move Jobs initially resisted, fearing it would weaken the Mac’s appeal.
However, the gamble paid off spectacularly. Suddenly, the iPod wasn’t just a cool accessory for Mac owners. It was a mass-market phenomenon. That decision marked a turning point in Apple’s history: Jobs realized that sometimes the fastest way to build an empire wasn’t to keep people out, but to invite everyone in.
The record-breaking 1.5 million downloads in the week after Apple brought iTunes to Windows came in at five times more than the 300,000 downloads that peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster achieved in its debut week in 1999 (remember it?). And 1.5 million was more than double the 600,000 iTunes downloads per week Apple reported selling to Mac users before the Windows release.
An internal struggle at Apple over bringing iTunes to Windows
The iTunes Music Store arrived on Windows on October 16, 2003. That was a full six months after it launched on Mac. A big reason for the delay was Jobs’ reluctance to make iTunes available to the unwashed PC masses.
He told his lieutenants at the time — Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Jeff Robbin and Tony Fadell — that both iTunes and the iPod music player boosted Mac sales.
The other execs countered this argument by pointing out that declining Mac sales could never outweigh the gain from increased iPod sales. They eventually convinced Jobs.
“The iTunes Music Store has revolutionized the way people legally buy music online, and now it’s available to tens of millions more music lovers with iTunes for Windows,” Jobs said in a press release at the launch. “While our competitors haven’t even come close to matching our first generation, we’re already releasing the second generation of the iTunes Music Store for Mac and Windows.”
As a result of this initial clash of ideas, the first week of iTunes on Windows likely proved a bit tense for Apple’s top brass. In the end, however, it marked a major milestone in the continued success of iTunes.
“The unbeatable combination of iPod and iTunes offers music lovers a seamless experience for buying, managing and listening to their digital music collections anywhere,” said Jobs in a press release marking the 1.5 million downloads milestone.
Later on, Jobs joked about giving Windows users access to such a beautiful Mac app. He famously called it like “giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”
Major growth for iTunes
In 2003, when iTunes Music Store hit 1.5 million downloads per week after launching iTunes on Windows, Apple’s service was growing at an astonishing rate. And things only accelerated from there.
By March 2004, iTunes hit 50 million downloads. And by August of that year, the iTunes Music Store catalog reached 1 million songs in the United States, a first for an online music service. It also racked up more than 100 million song downloads by that time.
Do you remember the first song you ever downloaded on iTunes? Let us know in the comments below.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
