Steve Jobs, one of the greatest innovators of both the 20th and 21st Centuries is dead. But his name will ring out eternally through history. 'Cause damn, that motherfucker changed the world and shit.
iTunes is just one of many ingenious inventions to come out of the Apple camp. From apps to hardware, Jobs QB'd some giant fucking touchdowns. Here are Steve Jobs' top ten contributions to the world of music.
10. The First Apple Computer
Except that you could probably get a nice tone banging out beats on this business failure of a wood box, the first Apple computer didn't really do shit for music besides setting the stage for a future revolution. This is where it all started.
9. Garage Band
Home recording technology is one of the fundamental means by which kids who have gotten into music and then changed the face of it have perfected their chops. In the cassette tape era, pause tapes built today's greatest DJs. We have yet to see the full extent to which future mighty producers, engineers, and musicians will have been produced by Garage Band's having been packed with Apples all these years, but guarantee it has made a great and positive impact.
8. iMovie
This app hit the market way back in 1999, before almost any home computer had the capacity to store and edit raw video and manipulate it in real time. Now, it's posible that iMovie is used to produce up to 90 percent of the videos uploaded to YouTube. It has been a major game changer in democratizing the music video production process. Everyone from little kids to old people have employed iMovie to create visuals for their favorite songs.
7. The iTunes Music Store
You're probably too young to remember this ... But Napster was the first major peer-to-peer filesharing site, and it was free. Armed with some of the fastest internet connections in all the land circa 2000, college kids across America were downloading copious amounts of MP3s at a rate that destroyed the reigning music business model in the blink of an eye. The iTunes Music Store allowed the big companies to make some digital money, and opened up the playing field for indies to get in on the action too.
6. The iTunes Media Player
Library, playlist, genres, seamless integration, sleek, controlling, powerful -- we definitely prefer that old-school Winamp. But most everybody else is a willing slave to iTunes, which is just how Steve Jobs wanted it. Smart.
5. The iBook
Before there was ever a Macbook Pro, there was the iBook. They probably won't admit it now, but anybody -- meaning bands, producers, rappers, DJs, etc. -- who was fucking with portable recording studios in 1999, making music in hotel rooms, tour buses, lawyer's offices, and elsewhere, probably had one of these and thought it was the shit. This was one of the first products Jobs brought to market after he first got back to Apple in 1997.
4. The Apple G5
This computer is the cornerstone upon which many a professional recording studio has been built. We can't even venture a guess at how many platinum albums were at some point single audio files on the hard drive of one of these fuckers. But suffice to say, there were a whole shitload of them.
3. The iPad
This tablet shit is still so new, we don't actually have any idea the many genius ways in which people are using them, except we know they play a part in beat-making and as live triggers. What that means for the future one can only guess. But they will probably completely replace laptops on stage in the not-too-distant future.
2. The iPhone
The ability to make, share, buy, and sell music and videos all in one portable device. Unfuckwithable.
1. The iPod
Possibly the greatest invention ever created. Bigger than the motherfuckin' lightbulb, and maybe more important. Edison would be proud.
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