REVEAL THE CONQUERING HERO 77
introduction of the iPod on October 23, 2001, demonstrates this
subtle but important difference.
It helps to understand the state of the digital music industry
at the time. People were carrying portable CD players that looked
monstrous compared with today’s tiny iPods. The few existing
digital music players were big and clunky or simply not that use-
ful due to a small storage capacity that allowed only a few dozen
songs. Some products, such as the Nomad Jukebox, were based on
a 2.5-inch hard drive and, while portable, were heavy and were
painfully slow to transfer songs from a PC. Battery life was so short
that the devices were pretty much useless. Recognizing a problem
in need of a solution, Jobs entered as the conquering hero.
“Why music?” Jobs asked rhetorically.
“We love music. And it’s always good to do something you
love. More importantly, music is a part of everyone’s life. Music
has been around forever. It will always be around. This is not
a speculative market. And because it’s a part of everyone’s life,
it’s a very large target market all around the world. But interest-
ingly enough, in this whole new digital-music revolution, there
is no market leader. No one has found a recipe for digital music.
We found the recipe.”
Once Jobs whetted the audience’s appetite by announcing
that Apple had found the recipe, he had set the stage. His next
step would be to introduce the antagonist. He did so by taking
his audience on a tour of the current landscape of portable music
players. Jobs explained that if you wanted to listen to music on
the go, you could buy a CD player that held ten to fifteen songs,
a flash player, an MP3 player, or a hard-drive device such as the
Jukebox. “Let’s look at each one,” Jobs said.
A CD player costs about $75 and holds about ten to fifteen
songs on a CD. That’s about $5 a song. You can buy a flash
player for $150. It holds about ten to fifteen songs, or about
$10 a song. You can go buy an MP3 CD player that costs
$150, and you can burn up to 150 songs, so you get down to
a dollar a song. Or you can buy a hard-drive Jukebox player
for $300. It holds about one thousand songs and costs thirty