Can Apple change ads?

Once upon a time, Apple was the iPod company. iPods were a much bigger business than the Mac, and they also made Apple a dominant force in the music industry. Then, as we all know, Apple jumped horse to the iPhone, which was a vastly bigger business again. But meanwhile, music switched from the download-to-own model pioneered by Apple to subscription streaming, and Apple was very late to streaming. Today it has an adequate, me-too streaming music product, but it’s far from setting the agenda. Apple doesn’t matter much in music anymore.

However, the switch to streaming also meant that music lost the strategic leverage that it had for Apple and other device companies - if you switched between stores you lost all the music you’d already bought, but if you switch streaming services you only lose your playlists, if that. Music stopped mattering as a way to lock people into an ecosystem, and it stopped being a strategic lever. Apple could perhaps* have created streaming itself, if it had had the vision, but it had little to gain from it.

What came after music? When Apple announced the iPhone, back in 2007, it also announced the original Apple TV, earlier in the same event. Google had bought Youtube two months earlier, Hulu launched that summer, and everyone in the TV industry knew that the future, at some point, would be unbundling and streaming. Steve Jobs thought he could do to TV what he had done to music - he could sweep away an arcane, complex, user-hostile experience driven by perverse incentives and misaligned industry structures, and replace it with one seamless simple experience, with Apple, of course, running the whole thing and taking a cut, but not, crucially, having to buy any actual TV shows itself (after all, Apple never had to sign musicians or run a mobile network). That didn’t happen, obviously. The Apple TV never really went anywhere, and today, Apple doesn’t matter much more in TV than it does in music.

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