50 years of Apple
We’re celebrating Apple’s 50th birthday with a week of content about the tech giant. It covers everything from personal recollections from our writers to the greatest — and worst — Apple gadgets as voted by you, and you can read it all on our 50 years of Apple page.
With Apple celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, I’ve heard talk in music circles about what the brand’s biggest contribution to audio has been over the past half a century.
That’s not to mention El Classico: the iPod, which I wrote about last year when I dusted mine off and gave it a spin. But to me there’s one other Apple product which comes to mind when we’re talking about the company’s golden anniversary — and it’s something I was reminded of when I recently sold by CD collection.
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It’s something many have forgotten about or talk about in nostalgic tones, which is alarming to someone like me who still uses it. But it’s dictated my views on tech and media to this day, and of course I’m talking about iTunes.
iTunes, youTunes, we all Tunes…
What have we lost? In 2026, digital is still lower-quality than physical, eradicates the ritual and artistry of putting on a vinyl or enjoying a game’s box art.
iTunes, for all you Gen Z-ers who haven’t heard of it, is a media player and library created by Apple — yes, ‘is’, the company still lets you download and use iTunes. It runs on Macs and Windows: no closed ecosystem here.
Released in January 2001 (five days after Runescape, and six days before Wikipedia, in a period of early internet history which was evidently formative for a young me), it let you buy music from its store or rip them from CDs.
You could then listen to them straight from the player or, if you owned an iPod, sync them so your player had your library. It also offered podcasts, movies, books and, while iOS was in its formative years, apps.
No longer is iTunes the default Apple media app, with the brand now stuffing its iPods and iPhones with loads of different platforms instead of one simple one. And given that most media consumption is now streamed, and downloaded straight to our personal device, there’s no arguing that iTunes is mostly redundant. But what it taught me about media is still an important to my views.
Burn baby burn, CD inferno
I grew up when convenient music streaming was still just a twinkle in Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s eye; if you wanted to hear something and didn’t want whatever junk was on the radio, you could either put on a YouTube music video (and I did create my fair share of playlists on there), or buy the CD.
I inherited an iPod Classic from my mum, and didn’t want to pay Apple’s high fees on digital albums, so buying CDs was how I acquired all my music.
A chain of British media stores called HMV was my go-to retailer, offering two-for-£5 deals on many discs. I spent many an hour trawling through its collections, trying to find CDs by my favorite artists which came under this deal. Charity shops, the British version of a thrift store whose proceeds go to charity, were also great for £1 discs.
Over my teenhood I collected hundreds of CDs, to the tune of about 5,000 tracks; not a massive collection by audiophiles’ standards, but a lot for a teen who’d only learnt to count that high recently.
I’d take these discs home, burn the disc to my computer using iTunes, and sync my iPod to have them on my handheld device.
It helped me see that physical and digital media wasn’t a binary choice: you could have both, and that’s been an important lesson I’ve kept with me ever since.
I still remember the ritual well: monitoring the burn speeds to see how fast it’d go, manually adding the album artwork since iTunes didn’t do it automatically, and correcting any of the many metadata problems (one of many: if two artists contributed on a track, iTunes would generally recognize the hyphenate as its own artist, rather than adding the track to either one of the artist’s own menus).
Slowly over many years, I amassed this digital library of albums, which I could listen to on my iPod or computer at my leisure, and this might seem a lot like music streaming but with extra steps. However, crucially, I still held onto the physical discs, and that’s what makes all the difference.
Most people I know consume their media digitally. You’ll stream music from Spotify, watch your movies on Netflix, buy your video games straight from Steam or the PlayStation Store.
Physical discs have largely been offered up on the alter of convenience, except among diehard fans of the format. It seems especially true of younger people who’ve grown up with the convenience of streaming and, most crucially, can’t afford to buy physical media.
But what have we lost? In 2026, digital is still lower-quality than physical, eradicates the ritual and artistry of putting on a vinyl or enjoying a game’s box art, and usage of it puts you at the mercy of the ever-changing libraries of profit-focused companies.
You could probably guess from my previous discussion of CDs, that I’m a physical media boy. While the CDs recently had to go due to a house move, I still have quite a few physical PS4 games, a large DVD collection (and a single Blu Ray) and many, many books.
There’s something about owning a shelf of films you can browse through, enjoying the tactile sensation of putting a disc in a drive, and actually owning the products I pay money for. I still long for the days of yore, when DVDs had plenty of special features and games had in-box maps.
I still remember the ritual well: monitoring the burn speeds to see how fast it’d go, manually adding the album artwork since iTunes didn’t do it automatically.
Then there’s the entire argument about media preservation. Some people treat movies that aren’t on Netflix or Disney Plus as effectively nonexistent; I’ve had friends that have seriously suggested pirating movies that they want to watch, which aren’t on Netflix. Yes, we had words after that. Suffice to say, digital media is a walled garden dictated by companies, and we can’t trust companies with media preservation.
(And yes, I know that physical media isn’t actually very good for media preservation; degradation means a DVD or CD won’t last forever. But given how many films simply aren’t available on any streaming service at all, it’s better than nothing).
I know I’m not alone in this passion. I’m impressed by the frequent Blu Ray hauls TechRadar’s resident disc reviewer covers, and there are many people who swear off digital media entirely. But I’m a traitor to this cause too.
The iTunes duology
I’ll admit, I stream content too: I use Spotify and Prime Video and the Epic Games Store. I still see some benefits of digital, even if I still want a library of physical ownership too. A weird combo? Not quite, and I think iTunes is to blame.
As you’ll remember, iTunes left me with both a physical and digital library: I could enjoy the convenience of my songs on my computer or iPod, but also had the discs themselves. If any accounts were broken or hacked, or my technology stopped working, I still owned the physical media and could simply use it again.
The same goes the other way: when I returned to my old CD collection a few months ago, in order to sell it, many of them just didn’t work. Thankfully, I had the digital copies still!
Plus, I could pop the CDs into a player and listen to them out loud, without having to pair via Bluetooth or be connected to the internet and lose connection when the speakers randomly decide to connect to another phone.
iTunes let me enjoy the best of both worlds, and so foster a nuanced view of the physical / digital media dichotomy. I still act on this to inform my buying decisions: I’ll buy DVDs or Blu Rays of films I really like, so I have them to hand whenever I want and can display them on my shelf, but don’t spend my own money on straight-to-streaming slop which isn’t worth preserving.
I don’t think this is intentionally what Apple was doing with iTunes; it just wanted a simple media library which would push users into buying straight from the storefront. But during my formative years, it helped me see that physical and digital media wasn’t a binary choice: you could have both, and that’s been an important lesson I’ve kept with me ever since.
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tom.bedford@hotmail.co.uk (Tom Bedford)
