Personal MP3 Player iPod 2001

The 1990s saw the arrival of ‘cloud storage’. The cloud enabled images and sounds to be stored and shared online, so for users uploading photos to services such as Facebook it was free and easy. However, behind the scenes, huge power-hungry data centres were required to store the enormous quantities of digital information being shared. Converting music to digital files made it possible to squeeze thousands of songs onto a single device. Computers were increasingly connected to the internet, enabling easy, and sometimes illegal, music-sharing, creating new challenges for the music industry. Users of the enormously successful iPod could legally download songs from Apple’s iTunes service.

The 1990s saw the arrival of ‘cloud storage’. The cloud enabled images and sounds to be stored and shared online, so for users uploading photos to services such as Facebook it was free and easy. However, behind the scenes, huge power-hungry data centres were required to store the enormous quantities of digital information being shared. Converting music to digital files made it possible to squeeze thousands of songs onto a single device. Computers were increasingly connected to the internet, enabling easy, and sometimes illegal, music-sharing, creating new challenges for the music industry. Users of the enormously successful iPod could legally download songs from Apple’s iTunes service.