FIFTEEN years ago, on April 28, 2003, Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched what he described as a revolutionary concept in the way music was bought and enjoyed.

The new online music iTunes store, the visionary Jobs said, would allow music lovers to download the songs they wanted to listen to – for just 99 cents a go. Little did we know it but this was the beginning of the end of the physical music collection. In place of a rack of neatly stacked CDs, or vinyl, our beloved music collections would travel online, onto our desktops, inside our phones, onto our tablets. With this change in consumption, some argue, came a change in appreciation. Where once we listened to entire albums, we now graze through singles. Many of us feel the depth of our musical knowledge has become more shallow - not many of us know the back catalogue of our favourite bands any more - while at the same time we are ironically sampling more types of music than before as iTunes and Spotify and Alexa make recommendations to us based on our tastes that we might never have sampled without the advent of online music.

The store began with 200,000 songs and took just a week to sell over one million. And across the country, fans listened to the downloaded music on their iPods - remember those? - complete with the distinctive white ear-buds.

By June 2004, when Apple launched the operation in the UK, France and Germany, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was describing it as the world’s leading online music store. By now it had 700,000 songs, available for 79p each.

It took until February 2006 for the billionth download to be bought, by a man from Michigan called Alex Ostrovsky who purchased a Coldplay song, Speed of Sound. The man was showered with Apple prizes and the company even set up a scholarship in his name to commemorate the landmark. Said Jobs: “Over one billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the internet.”

The popularity of the store, and the iPod, knew no bounds. On Christmas Day 2007, according to Apple, 20 million songs were downloaded in the space of 24 hours.

The 25 billion landmark was reached in February 2013, by a music fan in Germany. By this time, songs were being downloaded at the rate of more than 15,000 – every minute. The figure of 25 billion was roughly equal to three and a half songs from every person on the planet. The 35-billion mark was arrived at in May 2014.

Today, iTunes Store’s global reach is staggering. In addition to an estimated 35-40 million songs, it offers a colossal number of films, television shows, podcasts and audiobooks.

For years however, the most notable omission from iTunes store were the Beatles. It took a full decade of negotiations before the Fab Four’s albums could be downloaded from the platform. When the deal was finally struck, in November 2010, Ringo Starr spoke for everyone concerned when he said: “I am particularly glad to no longer be asked when the Beatles are coming to iTunes. Peace and love,” he added.

Four years later, the Irish rock band, U2, stirred controversy when as a marketing stunt they decided to release their new album, Songs of Experience, free to the personal iTunes libraries of half a billion users. Far from being grateful, however, many of them saw this as an intrusion and demanded that Apple come up with software to allow them to delete it. The band’s singer, Bono, apologised, saying: “I had this beautiful idea and we kind of got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that sort of thing.”

The digital music revolution can be traced back to 1999 and the launch of Napster, which enabled millions of people to share their MP3 music files free of charge and build up vast collections of music without the artists receiving a penny. The US band Metallica were one of the groups who angrily confronted Napster – a stance they later characterised as “F--- these guys! Let’s go after them.” Napster caused the music industry much anguish and frustration before it was shut down in 2001.

Apple initially launched iTunes in 2001 as a digital music jukebox. This, in turn, led to the creation, also in 2001, of the MP3 player, the iPod – which, Jobs said with pride at his speech in 2003, “has revolutionised portable music listening” and had already sold 700,000 units.

He conceived the iTunes store as a legal alternative to the “stealing” of artists’ work. To get it off the ground Apple had to strike deals with the big five music companies - EMI Records, Sony, Vivendi Universal, AOL Time Warner and BMG - and there would be no subscription fees.

Said Jobs: “The store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use and to put music on an unlimited number of iPods for on-the-go listening. Consumers don't want to be treated like criminals and artists don't want their valuable work stolen. [It] offers a groundbreaking solution for both”.

The store’s impact was summed up in 2015 by author Peter Doggett, in his bestselling book, Electric Shock. In its first three years, Doggett says, the store “not only saw off the music industry’s own download stores, PressPlay and MusicNet, but also sent history roaring simultaneously forwards".

Each advancement in iPod and iTunes technology threatened the demise of the CD, he wrote. Jobs’s insistence that the store should be allowed to sell individual tracks rather than complete albums destroyed, at a stroke, “the purity of popular music’s dominant art form for the previous three decades.” Many artists, Doggett said, refused to permit their albums to be decimated in this fashion – “but as the industry tilted ever more violently in Apple’s direction, each of them was forced to give way.”

But the way in which we enjoy recorded music has continued to evolve. Today, more than half of our consumption is accounted for by streaming.

In January the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) revealed that in 2017, 135.1 million albums or their equivalent were either streamed, purchased online or downloaded – a rise of 9.5 per cent on 2016. There were 68.1 billion audio streams, 1.5 billion of them in a single week in December, from such services as Apple Music and Spotify. However, Vinyl, once written off, continued its lusty revival selling 4.1 million LPs.

Last month, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said the online streaming services had become the recording industry’s single largest source of revenue, ahead of physical sales of CDs and even digital downloads, for the first time.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said streaming subscriptions last year expanded by 41 per cent on 2016. Physical CD sales slumped by five per cent. Download revenue slumped by a fifth.

So what has been the impact of the iTunes store, now that it is 15 years old? A spokesman at the BPI told the Sunday Herald that, after the year 2000, the global recording industry “wasn’t entirely sure” how best to respond to the “serious challenge to growth” posed by music piracy and illegal downloads.

He added: “The iTunes store helped to play an important role in providing a legal service for digital music and sign-posting a way forward. It presented a practical user model for digital music that artists, labels and consumers alike could understand and engage with, and in the process it helped the industry to find a way of monetising MP3 technology so that it could look to gain a return in its considerable investment in new music.

“As it turned out, although they were in the ascent for over a decade, downloads were to prove a transitional format, and they are now being fast superseded by access-based streaming as the way that most people choose to discover and consume their music day-to-day.

“Ironically, whereas downloads appeared to be accelerating reduced demand for music on physical formats, it’s now downloads that are in decline, while vinyl is flourishing and the compact disc continues to show its resilience.

“But the iTunes store has certainly played its part in shaping our music landscape - introducing consumers to a post-digital world and helping to lay the foundations for Apple Music as one of its main legacies.”

THEN … AND NOW

The Official UK Singles charts are based on official sales of downloads, CDs, vinyl and audio streams. Last week’s number one was Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa with their song, One Kiss. Lipa was only seven years old when the iTunes store was launched.

Other acts in the charts include Drake, George Ezra, Sigala & Paloma Faith, Cardi B, and The Weeknd.

Back in April 2003, when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes store, the chart was led by Busted with You Said No. Scots-born David Sneddon, winner of the BBC show Fame Academy, was two places behind them, with Don’t Let Go.

The chart also included the White Stripes (7 Nation Army), Kym Marsh (Cry), Robbie Williams (Come Undone), Madonna (American Life) and Avril Lavigne (I’m With You).