The design and functionality of the iPod was something Jobs obsessed over during its gestation period. She adds that record labels saw it as one thing “to sue that little company Diamond” but something else to “try and take on a behemoth” such as Apple. “Once the iPod came along, they were more open to a middle ground,” says Rosen.

After the failed Rio litigation, there had been a change in temperature among labels, slowly accepting it was better to work with rather than against such devices. It was an enormous gamble but Jobs’s timing was, not for the first or last time, impeccable. The next step was to develop a music player that shunted its rivals into the ditch, and from there followed a move into music retail with the iTunes Store. ITunes, launched in January 2001, enabled the ripping and management of CDs on a user’s computer. He was convinced only Apple could successfully streamline digital music.

Jobs viewed this as an unmissable opportunity, damning the Rio and its competitors as “brain-dead” due to clunky software and design. In October 1999, however, a US district court judge denied the RIAA’s demand for an injunction against the Rio and more than 200,000 players were sold soon after. The record labels “wanted the player off the market”, says Hilary Rosen, who was CEO of the trade organisation Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) between 19. Steve Jobs with the iPod on 23 October 2001. Record labels felt it should be subject to a blank media levy and pay royalties to copyright owners on every device sold. It was Diamond Multimedia and its Rio range of MP3 players that first caught the public’s imagination and the music business’s ire. The first digital music players emerged in late 1998 and early 1999, notably the Personal Jukebox (developed by Compaq Research), which held the equivalent of a CD’s worth of music and was prone to skipping if bumped. “Whatever the music industry thought, that’s what you shouldn’t do.” So the iPod benefited not just from the design deficiencies of the MP3 players before it, but also from an early mover taking all the legal heat from a record business spooked into fight mode. “ was a bellwether for idiocy,” claims Jim Griffin, an industry consultant who cut his digital teeth at Geffen in the 1990s, putting out the first full-length song legally online in June 1994 ( Head First by Aerosmith). The industry responded by attempting to sue filesharing service Napster and the copycat services that came in its wake: litigation rather than innovation.

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