Ten years ago on Oct. 23, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced a quirky little music player that was only compatible with five per cent of American computers. "One thousand songs in your pocket" was his pitch as he showed off the five-gigabyte device, with its now iconic (vintage perhaps?) scroll wheel.
An analyst in the New York Times, which carried the story on page eight of its business section the next day, said the iPod wouldn't make much of a difference.
But Jobs, always the visionary, called the iPod a "landmark" product and history has shown the consummate salesman may have undersold it. The iPod transformed Apple into the behemoth it is today, and revolutionized the music industry in ways it's still coming to grips with.
I was in the middle of writing this article last Wednesday when I had to change assignments -- Jobs had died after years of health problems and I was going to write his obituary.
Millions of words have been lavished on Jobs since his death, an outpouring unlike any other for a billionaire entrepreneur. He's already being canonized with scientific leaders such as Thomas Edison for his contributions to personal computing and telecommunications.
But it's culturally where Jobs may have his most lasting impact, forever changing the way we listen to music and relate to music technology.
"The iPod was really the pivotal device for this century which showed that technology could not only transform our lives but also be an object of lust, in and among itself," Steven Levy, the author of the 2006 book "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness" told me.
When Jobs unveiled the iPod, it wasn't the first MP3 player to hit the market, it was simply the best. I owned a Sony MiniDisc player and I still have nightmares about trying to transfer songs to it, and that was one of the better products out there.
The key to the iPod has always been its combination of aesthetics with function. In all its versions over the years it's been attractive to look at and had a simplicity that put your technophobic grandmother at ease. It was everything we didn't know we wanted.
"You can't just ask customers what they want then try to give that to them," Jobs famously said. "By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
And where music companies sued college kids and single moms to stop Napster and the illegal downloads that were just starting to hurt the industry, with iTunes, Jobs saw dollar signs for Apple (and few less for the record labels).
In February 2010, iTunes surpassed 10 billion downloads, an impressive number considering the easy access to illegal downloads. But that hasn't saved the music business, which has seen its music stores shuttered, album sales plummet and stagnant concert revenues.
The digital revenues have been nice, but haven't come anywhere close to the cash that the massively popular bands of the 1980s and 1990s were used to.
Earlier this year, former glam rocker and current mom rocker Jon Bon Jovi went so far as to tell The Sunday Times Magazine: "Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business."
But for indie musicians, the iPod has been a blessing and a curse. It's an argument that many bands have among themselves in vans and over beers in grimy green rooms.
Nick Greaves, the guitarist (and manager) for the Juno-nominated band The Most Serene Republic, says that they've watched record sales slow drastically over the course of the last decade, even while their concerts remain popular.
"When we first started most of our marketing was aimed at Canada (the band signed to famed Toronto label Arts and Crafts in 2005) but because of the digital trends, our music went all over the world and we have fan bases in Europe and we've been able to tour there, and headline in the U.K.," he said. "Artists might not make money from physically selling their records but they can also go and tour all these places.
"We have a great following in the United States and that's probably from people going and (illegally downloading) all our records."
But Greaves' band mate, keyboardist Ryan Lenssen, is not nearly as positive, telling me over and over again that going into the music industry is a terrible idea.
Lenssen has gone back to university to study political science at the University of Toronto and has written several essays on the impact of digital media, which he says has made people value albums less.
"My father in the 1960s would spend a week's (allowance) on a single record and that was a massive amount of resources spent so he could enjoy something," he said. "He then listened to it non-stop, knew every single word, every nuance of the record."
Kids today, the 26-year-old Lenssen says, are used to instantly gratifying their musical impulses for free and tossing it aside.
"It's a massive deflation in value of media," he said. " I remember how important it was to buy something from a band (when I was younger), and how many times I'd consume it, where nowadays . . . kids, if you look at their YouTube habits, if something doesn't happen in the first 10 seconds, they are gone.
"You really have to be an abnormal listener to get through an entire three-minute song now, let alone an entire album."
But there's a reason a quirky indie band like the Most Serene Republic can find an audience.
The iPod was the massive crack in a fundamental aspect of the last half of 20th century pop culture -- there was mainstream culture, and there was the counter-culture. Our pop culture has gone democratic, and is messy and chaotic as a result. Musical tastes are much more varied today than they ever were. (Put your iPod on shuffle to test this theory: mine went indie rock, sludge metal, country, old school hip hop, indie rock.)
Pop culture is a hyper-personal and hyper-local affair, derived from Facebook feeds and pick-your-own-version-of-reality websites. Music is a choose-your-own adventure book.
The iPod can't take all the credit or blame for our post-Napster music reality. But surely, there is no better symbol.
