Biography | Steve Jobs — He Sold Songs for Ninety-Nine Cents from This Hall

On 28 April 2003 Steve Jobs took a stage in Moscone West and opened a shop that sold songs one at a time.

The iTunes Music Store launched that morning with more than 200,000 tracks from BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner.

A song cost 99 cents.

An album cost $9.99.

There was no subscription.

A buyer could preview any track for thirty seconds, download it in AAC at 128 kbps, burn it to an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, and load it onto any number of iPods.

Playback was limited to three authorised Macintosh computers.

The store ran only on Macs, through the new iTunes 4.

Macs then held a sliver of the personal-computer market.

That was the argument Jobs had used on the labels in Cupertino: a small platform could not wreck their business.

The same morning Apple introduced the third-generation iPod, the first with a dock connector instead of a FireWire port on the top edge.

A week later Apple said the store had sold more than one million songs.

More than half of those sales were albums.

More than half of the 200,000 titles had been bought at least once.

The Windows store followed on 16 October 2003, in this same building, with Jobs demonstrating the software on a Dell.

Moscone West at 800 Howard Street is the hall of the iPhone in 2007, the MacBook Air in 2008, and Jobs's last WWDC in 2011.

It still stands.

The Mac application that held the store was retired in 2019, when Catalina split iTunes into Music, TV and Podcasts.

Paid downloads survived inside the Music app.

Streaming had already taken the centre of the business.

Cover: Moscone West dressed for WWDC in June 2011, eight years after this morning and in the same glass box.

Photo: Anton Zelenov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.