Steve Jobs Changed The Way We Listen To Music - For The Better

Time is a funny thing. When you look at a photo of the original iPod and compare it to the music products Apple updated only days ago – the iPod Touch and minute touchscreen iPod Nano – it looks faintly ridiculous. With its tiny screen, 10GB of storage and a mechanical scroll wheel, it's like a product from another age, something your grandparents might have used to pick up the World Service.

The original iPod, it's hard to believe, is only ten years old. Yet, over the course of the last decade, Apple's portable music device, along with iTunes – the digital music store that brought it to life – has transformed the music industry and taken it, almost single-handedly, into the the digital age it now sits in.

A lot can happen in ten years, but as far as the iPod is concerned, none of it would have happened without Steve Jobs. The death of Apple's co-founder and the man who, as the company's CEO, guided it to become the most powerful brand in the world is an immeasurable loss to many. Aside from the iPod, Jobs made computers cool again with the iMac; made everyone realise that their phone needed to more than just a phone – it needed to be an iPhone; and, more recently, brought tablet computers to life with the iPad.

A tribute to Steve Jobs, posted on the Apple website.

But none of those products has had the same impact on my life as the iPod. I remember getting my first one in 2004 (the 4th generation model; I was a late adopter). The thought of being able to carry around every song I owned in my pocket and listen to it where ever I wanted to seemed utterly incredible and stupid at the same time – but now not having that ability isn't even imaginable. Nor is it possible to think of a world where songs, videos, movies and apps aren't available at the touch of a button.

As someone who now works in the music industry, it's also difficult to think of a time when the music industry wasn't part of this digital age that the iPod has made a necessity. Imagine, for a moment, not being able to download a song as you hear it on the radio. It's not possible.

When someone like Steve Jobs dies, it's very easy to get caught up in the moment – to over glorify his legacy – and I'm not about to say Apple has changed my life, because it hasn't. To many, not least the people that Jobs worked with and most of all his family, for whom his death is genuinely an immeasurable loss, it has.

But Jobs and the iPod he pioneered has changed something for me – and every music fan. He's changed the way we listen to music for the better.