iLounge

Popular Science has included the iTunes Music Store in the Computing section of their annual “Best of What’s New” issue (December 2003), along with the Power Mac G5. Popular Science does not provide “rankings” within the category, although the Grand Prize winner in the Computing category was 802.11g, which Apple was first to commercially adopt.

iTunes Music Store Transcript:

“Apple iTunes Music Store:
Seriously, is there anything Steve Jobs can’t fix?

After years of refusing to pay for digital music, consumers have made Apple’s iTunes Music Store the music industry’s first digital success story, purchasing a whopping 10 million songs in just over four months.  This figure is even more impressive when you consider that the service is available only to Mac users, and that the only portables that can play the tunes are iPods.  What is Apple doing right?  The answer is part of business (all songs in the 200,000-plus library are sold for 99 cents and come from an impressive roster of labels) and part technology (the store is fully integrated into Apple’s iTunes software, making it simple to listen to 30-second samples, then download purchased songs into your music library).  What’s more, while the digital-rights management system does restrict widespread copying, users can still share songs between several Macs and iPods and burn music to audio CDs.”

Article author’s corrections—Since printing of this issue, the “iTMS” has become available on Mac and PC, and the library has grown to over 400,000 songs.