Thank you for the music, and more...

NEW DELHI: Two decades after the world was introduced to an iconic portable music player that had changed the face of how we consume music,and engage with technology in the larger

scheme of things, the maker of this device pulled the plug on retailing the iPod earlier last week. While social media was abuzz with posts on how revolutionary this singular device was back then, and how much nostalgia it has invoked now, it is essential to view this development in the context of the quantum leap in technology we have been witnessing since the turn of the new millennium. The early 2000s heralded a tech shift that most post-millennials take for granted.

Our quest for mining an endless reservoir of music, which took shape in the audio format of MP3 has been instrumental in shaping our access to online resources in a major way, whether it’s the consumption of news, literature, works of art, subscriber-only podcasts, live streaming of EDM concerts, entertainment on the go and more. Today, when we talk about honouring IP rights,and refraining from illegally downloading a movie or an album from the internet, we must look back at a time, when there were no digital guardrails to protect creators, artistes, filmmakers or anybody involved in creating a work of art. If it could be copied digitally, it obviously must be free, went the refrain. Back then,when the internet was in a nascent stage of development, the creative community hadn’t yet come up with a framework that could protect its financial interests outside of the analogue mode. The sales of music albums, DVDs, software, books and newspapers, and theatrical footfalls took a massive hit, as everything deployed online could be replicated and shared by billions. With free to download peer-to peer file sharing programmes like Napster making a killing by allowing users around the world to freely share music, even major bands like the heavy metal outfit Metallica felt the pangs of their fans not paying for music.

The band members were known to be notorious for chasing after digital pirates, and ensuring that they were prosecuted to the fullest extent of law. P2P file sharing via torrent based clients and the ensuing piracy wave was also one of the big reasons for the dwindling of cinema revenues globally. Enter the US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act which for the first time attempted to address how IP of digital content creators could be protected in the Wild West of the internet. It has also laid the foundation for the technology through which OTT platforms today are able to clearly steer their subscribers to geographically locked content on their apps. Geo locking is why OTT viewers in India can technically access material curated only for this region. Long story short, the portability and exchange of music in many ways inspired the creation of the

framework upon which a lot of our new age convenience-centric technologies are based, while protecting the interests of the creators. Even India, which for the longest time was known as a nation that can’t and won’t pay for digital content has gradually begun to embrace the idea of change, thanks to the democratisation of technologies. We now know why paywalls exist for premium news and media content, we aren’t shy to shell out a few hundred bucks to watch a film premiere on a favourite platform or even gift a digital musical album when the occasion demands. It’s a concept that might have sounded alien less than 20 years ago, but is now part of our daily lives. And we all have a portable jukebox to thank for it.