The era of MP3 players began, in which

[zakiyatasnim]

The Walkman became synonymous with the word "music player" and a symbol of miniaturization and technology that allowed people to listen to music in solitude.

But in November 2001, Apple released the iPod, a versatile MP3 player with an intuitive interface, a built-in battery, and a hard drive that stored songs—not discs or cassettes. And in 2003, iTunes appeared.

Steve Jobs called the iPod the "Walkman of the 21st century" - a simplified version france number data of the Sony player, which not only makes it convenient to listen to music, but also to buy and download it.



Sony lost to Apple's iPod - largely due to business models, writes Vox.

Apple offered to buy music through iTunes and its own ecosystem, while Sony did not want to harm its music business and support the MP3 format, in which music is easy for pirates to use, the publication believes.

For example, Sony devices were tied to the SonicStage program, through which songs had to be converted to Sony's ATRAC3 format.

Another reason for the gradual transition from the Walkman to the iPod was its ease of use. You could load a thousand songs onto an Apple player, all mechanical functions like rewinding a song were “laid down” in software, and the constantly updated and cheaper iTunes library allowed the iPod to be “legitimized” in the eyes of labels who saw a threat in MP3.

While CD player sales were double those of MP3 players in the summer of 2004, by 2005 iPod sales had grown 616%, and by 2008 Apple had captured 48% of the MP3 player market. Its closest competitor, the SanDisk Sansa, had only 8%.

Gradually, the iPhone and other smartphones have displaced MP3 players from the mass market - now they are mainly popular only among audiophiles.