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Here's your question and answer of the week from the Punknews Formspring:
Q: on steve jobs - did itunes help or hurt punk rock? A: Helped, absolutely. Perhaps not iTunes in and of itself but the concept of making digital music wide spread and easily accessible. I remember in the late 90's (early 2000's) labels tried their hand at selling digital music and were completely tanking the market ($3 songs and sometimes only selling singles or worse, not the singles). iTunes actually won market share so quickly and easily because up until them, no one was doing it right. Flat cost and $10 an album was key. Later Jobs pushed to release music without DRM protection and the major labels fucking went for it! This push helped punk/independent music in a few ways: 1) People who may have once been intimidated to walk into an indie record store and browse through racks and racks of shit that is pretty much indistinguishable based on packaging can now log on to iTunes, find the entire catalog of a smaller band (say like, Cobra Skulls), listen to song samples, make a determination and possibly buy the music all in less time than it takes to muster up the courage to even face the condescending prick employees of a record store (Holy run on sentence). For bands who lack things like radio and MTV(HA), airplay, this is incredibly valuable. 2) Now, with nothing more than an iTunes deal a band can have their music distributed not only across the country but around the globe. This absolutely killed the idea that you needed a huge label to get your music to remote markets (there's still the issue of the technological divide and what not but whatever).
Again, it's more what this influenced than "iTunes changed punk music". But now most small labels have their own digital download store (if they don't rely on iTunes), hell bands can even sell their music directly through bandcamp. Regardless of Jobs intentions (which may be no more noble than, make money), he helped bands harness the digital age in a way that actually helped them get out there without the mechanisms of the old music industry.
-Rich
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