Stop linking to unresearched liberal press articles.
The original MP3.com sold singles as well as albums, primarily from indie artists and overseas acts seeking a broader audience way back in the late nineties.
The RIAA was terrified and spent far more money trying to shut them down than they did trying to get Napster shut down.
You might visit the judge’s statement slapping the RIAA down in the MP3.com case. Bottom line is that there was no Apple music store online in the nineties, but you could buy individual songs from artists that were real innovators.
You might correctly say that Apple (while nearly a decade late to the party) was able to get the legacy music publishers to release a lot of old acts into the mix, but in no way is that even close to being a pioneer.
Pretty much the same story as their late forays into the digital music player and phone markets. What Apple brought to the party was hype, and legions of fans. They left out features common in their competitors offerings to achieve stability and miniaturization, then claimed to have invented an already maturing product category.
Well, try reading “Jobs” by Walter Isaacson if you don’t like my links.
You are delusional. The indies you were talking about was not the music the real public wanted. That was what Apple and Steve Jobs was able to accomplish by inventing a way to convince the big music publishers who HAD THE MUSIC THE PUBLIC WANTED, not the fringe music who could not get published on the major labels, to be willing to put their catalogs on line. THAT was a major sea change in music. You are being disingenuous by claiming anything else. . . and deliberately distorting history.
You claim minor players without major engineering abilities made the major strides but you are wrong. Just because they may have had a product out first, does not mean they "developed" it. Developing it means making it WORK. . . making it into a product that works for people. Not a product that if you do these steps exactly right it will work for geeks, but a product that works with the general public that they want to buy and use. Show us where Apple has ever claimed to have invented the smartphone? The MP3 player. You will not find Apple claiming that. Only Apple haters claim they say that.
Apple redefines the market and refines the products until they are making the best in the categories. . . and people want to use them because they are easy to use and provide value and work.