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Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

What's uncontroversial about that? The iTunes Store did make (legal) digital music mainstream. That's not to say it was the first store of its kind, but it was certainly the first to have widespread success.

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CDs are digital music, everyone was listening to digital music before apple did anything. People were using walkmans long before the iPod.

The point is trying to credit apple for "digital" music as opposed to "analog" music. That is just absurd. Credit them from making a business out of selling digital music, but not for making digital music popular.

Completely fair point – I was reading "digital" in this context as something ephemeral, like a computer file (mp3s etc.), rather than a physical object such as CD, even though as you say CDs are digital too.

I don't think anybody realistically considers a CD "digital".

Of course they do, in general—there's nothing analog about CDs. But in this context it clearly meant "digital downloads".

Or maybe "digital" means "mp3 delivered over internet" in this instance.

You're being pedantic. The author was clearly not talking about media formats like CDs, which store music digitally as an implementation detail but are still a physical object that you buy just like records and tapes. It seems pretty clear that the author is talking about music whose primary form is purely digital, like MP3s that you could download on your computer and transfer to your iPod.

Put another way: Anybody can tell you what a CD looks like — round, shiny, flat, about yea wide — but nobody knows what an MP3 looks like, because it is a purely digital format. The difference of physicality is the salient part here.

How's the autism spectrum treating you?

"CDS ARE DIGITAL MUSIC!!!"

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