Enter Apple, one of the first few companies that had the sense to try to turn the music industry's digital liability into an asset. Illegal or not, downloadable music provided a convenience and ease-of-use that listeners craved, and Apple bet that people would pay for the privilege.

They were right. The , the only legal game in town that sold major label music for a time, quickly became a force to be reckoned with in the industry. The iTunes Store pulled so far ahead that a number of traditional, non-online music retailers filed for bankruptcy within a few years.

In the process, Apple had pulled downloadable music out of the seedy back alleys of the Internet, shined it up, and delivered it to the lap of the cultural mainstream.

The iPod not only rocked the boat for the people who distributed music, but the people who made music as well. Being a software-based retailer, Apple's music store allowed smaller artists to sell their music with relatively low barriers to entry compared to the cost of fabricating and distributing a plastic disc. As a result, the number of artists--and thus, consumer choice--on the Internet exploded, marginalizing the earning power of major musical acts. The iPod effectively took a big slice of bigwig revenues and distributed it among the indie label masses.