The Apple Empire

Is the 21st century Apple’s?

I remember watching the video of Jeff Han on TEDTalks in 2006, demonstrating his breakthrough touch screen technology; yet even then, I could not have imagined its widespread commercial applications until a year later when the iPod Touch and iPhone appeared on the market. With the release of those two products Apple revolutionized the consumer electronic and mobile industries, and now, with the recent launch of the iPad, it is about to revolutionize the future of print and digital media.

I’ve argued before that the print industry has failed at innovating new business models to capitalize on the emergence of interactive digital media technologies and at responding to the shift in readership from print to online, declining sales, diminishing advertising revenue and consumer demand for free online content. But where until now no media revolution has taken place, one company has taken the lead imagining the future of digital media and is changing the way consumers interact with, engage with and purchase their content: namely, Apple Inc.

Much like print, the music, film and television industries have been extremely slow in carving out their role in media’s digital future. Where Apple has taken the lead providing innovative solutions to the “digital problem,” embracing the technological revolution, traditional media has decried it instead, failing to innovate in the face of change. The internet and new media have brought to the fore the desires of consumers who have been sending clear messages about how they want to engage with content and how much – and what exactly – they are willing to pay for. Why has Apple been the only company listening?

The first threat posed by digital media in the internet age came via online music file sharing in the late 1990s. With the rise of digital technologies and peer-to-peer networks, music was more popular than ever but CD sales were dropping. Rather than address the underlying issue (i.e. the value of music content, and the medium for accessing and purchasing it), the music industry cried piracy and waged a war on its consumers rather than come up with innovative solutions. They would have better spent their energy on rethinking their business model, discovering new ways of engaging and wooing customers, inventing new and easier means for accessing (and purchasing) content and reevaluating their $16-25 album price-point.

With the launch of the iTunes store in 2003, just two years after the launch of the iPod, Apple took its first steps towards ruling the digital media empire by rethinking the music industry business model, taking the profit-consuming distribution system that stood between artists and consumers out of the equation and making it easier and more desirable for consumers to purchase content, rather than download it illegally. Seven years later, Apple is the world’s largest music retailer, beating out Amazon and Google with over 85 per cent of the U.S. and global market share, and just recently marked its 10th billion song purchased and downloaded, with 70 per cent of the market downloading those songs to Apple iPods.

Apple’s dominance over the music industry in the first decade of the 21st century was as both platform provider (iPod) and distributor (iTunes). As their technological innovations in video (AppleTV), touch screen (iPod Touch) and mobile (iPhone) have advanced, so too has their growth into distribution markets of film and television, mobile applications (an industry entirely of their creation) and, with the launch of the iPad, now newspapers, magazines and book publishing.

By enabling users multiple ways of engaging with and accessing content, Apple has, as Richard Waters argues in a recent Financial Times article about the industry generated by apps, accomplished nothing short of “stretching the boundaries of online content, forcing media, commerce and other businesses that make a living on the web to rethink how they reach – and engage the interests of – their customers.”

The launch of the iPad marks a watershed moment in the history of print and the future of digital media, and has the potential to do for newspapers, magazines, and publishing, what the iPod and iTunes have done for the music, film and television industries. The iPad and touch screen technology just may reinvigorate consumer passion for the printed word by fusing the two-dimensional medium of literature and information with an interactive, visual and virtual user-generated experience that nevertheless is still at our fingertips. (Just see Wired magazine’s digital reader application to get excited about what is in store.) Indeed, Amazon Kindle’s lack of touch screen might be why it has yet to have noticeably taken off.

With the potential now for print to be so much more than words on a page, the iPad may finally encourage and inspire readers to start purchasing digital content that until now has been free – but only if traditional media embraces this opportunity to revolutionize their product and reward their digital readership with a unique and value-worthy experience.

If traditional media and entertainment industries are in decline, it is only because they have been remarkably short sighted and resistant to such change, failing to envision the future as digital and the role they could have played dictating its terms. In the empire of creative content distribution, Apple has emerged as a leading and reliable star, dictating the future of digital technologies and the innovative business models that make them pay.