Before the iPod, Apple products were consigned to the Mac nerd ghetto. You'd be hard pressed to pull a random person off the street and find that they knew even what Apple was. But by 2004, the iPod had sold enough units that everyone wanted and/or used an iPod, making Apple a mainstream cultural player like never before. At that point, if you asked a person on the street what products Apple made, odds are pretty good that they'd pull an iPod out of their pocket and show you.

It's amusing to point out that, in 2004, Apple had been making Macs for 20 years--and the iPod for only three--and that one digital music player changed the fundamental nature of a thirty year-old company almost overnight. Within a few years, Apple expanded into two other consumer electronic categories with the Apple TV and the iPhone. To reflect these changes, Apple Computer, Inc. .

The iPod's success went hand-in-hand with the iTunes Music Store, which opened in 2003 and became the United States' largest music retailer only five years later. Apple's domination of the music industry, along with iPod follow-ups like the iPhone and iPad, soon made Apple the second most valuable corporation in the world.

The turn of the millennium saw the music industry in a flat-out panic. MP3s gained popularity around the mid-late 1990s due to small file sizes and relatively high sound quality. By 2000, users illegally traded hundreds of thousands of songs in MP3 format on Napster, a peer-to-peer music sharing service. The music industry found itself competing against an unregulated spigot of digital music files that flowed as freely as water from a tap.