"It's starting to happen," said Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, during a recent visit to New York. He was riding in a cab when he noticed dozens of people with distinctive white headphones stuck in their ears.
Of course he recognized the ear buds as the same ones that ship with Apple's iPod digital music player. But up to that point, he later told journalists, he hadn't seen first-hand the phenomenon that he'd helped create. iPods were everywhere.
Now, with the release of the mini iPod, it's starting to happen in Taiwan, too. Released only a few weeks ago, the scaled-down version of the original iPod has already sold out at local retailers and the waiting lists are now "several weeks" long. The stores aren't saying exactly how many weeks and most consumers don't mind the wait. Others, though, have been less patient.
Apple doesn't release regional sales figures, but the company says the frenzy in Taiwan is proportionally on par with sales in Japan, where 1,000 people waited in line at Apple's store in Tokyo's Ginza District on the day the mini was released there.
The Japanese, too, are now having to queue up for a kawaii mini iPod and the ones lucky enough to have already gotten theirs are wondering when Apple's online music store will be available in their country.
Given the way the company has grown in the past year, it won't be long before Japanese and the rest of us in Asia will be downloading music directly onto our iPods. The company is No. 43 in Interbrand's annual survey of the world's top-100 brands, a 24 percent increase over last year and the biggest jump in growth of any brand on the list.
In dollar figures, Apple is now valued at US$6.87 billion, US$1.32 billion more than last year. (They rank behind Ikea at No. 40, Harley Davidson at No. 41, and Heinz at No. 42, but are ahead of such global powerhouses as MTV at No. 46, Yahoo at No. 65 and even Boeing at No. 94. The No. 1 brand, you might have guessed, remains Coca-Cola.)
But despite the runaway success of Apple's iPod, competition is not far behind. The company that invented the portable music player, Sony, has now released a digital version of the Walkman and helped launch the online music store Label Gate, in which they have a controlling stake as well as their own Connect online music retailer.
Industry-watchers contend, however, that Sony's ability to catch up with Apple's iTunes Music Store might be hampered by the fact that they have a recording label of their own, Sony Music Entertainment, which they have a vested interest in promoting over other labels. Label Gate currently offers some 38,000 titles for downloading and is averaging 130,000 downloads a month. Apple, by comparison, now offers over 1 million titles at its music store and averages 6.5 million downloads per month.
Japanese buyers of iPods and mini iPods will also be wanting the iTunes Music Store for economic reasons: The price of downloading at Label Gate is US$1.90 for a track from a Japanese artist and US$1.50 for all others. Apple sells tracks for US$0.99 each and is expected to offer similar pricing in Japan and the rest of Asia.
Apple and Sony's competition for customers will be limited, however. Both companies offer music for downloading in only their own proprietary file-types and the tracks can only be downloaded to their respective devices. And so while Japanese pop star AI has many fans in Taiwan, they won't be able to download her music to the new mini iPod they just bought. While it's possible to convert the tracks from one proprietary form to another, doing so can dramatically decrease the sound quality.
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