iTunes Music Store: Happy 10th Birthday!

It was a 10 years ago today that a hale n’ hearty Steve Jobs introduced the iTunes Music Store. Of course, the experts said only Mac zealots would care and the venture was sure to fail — some things will never change.

However, the iTunes Music Store didn’t fail and over the intervening years has come to account for about 10 percent of Apple’s $45 billion quarterly revenues. Perhaps more importantly, Apple claims 800 million people around the world have iTunes accounts and that the great majority of those accounts bill directly to a credit card.

Put another way? If the iTunes Store were a stand alone enterprise, it would rank 130 on the Fortune 500.

With that in mind consider the Hunter S. Thompson quote Steve Jobs used in his introduction of the iTunes Music Store to the world:

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

Steve Jobs iTunes Music Store introduction starts at about 23 minutes in…

What a charmer, that Steve…

What’s you take?