What's uncontroversial about that? The iTunes Store did make (legal) digital music mainstream. That's not to say it was the first store of its kind, but it was certainly the first to have widespread success.

CDs are digital music, everyone was listening to digital music before apple did anything. People were using walkmans long before the iPod.

The point is trying to credit apple for "digital" music as opposed to "analog" music. That is just absurd. Credit them from making a business out of selling digital music, but not for making digital music popular.

You're being pedantic. The author was clearly not talking about media formats like CDs, which store music digitally as an implementation detail but are still a physical object that you buy just like records and tapes. It seems pretty clear that the author is talking about music whose primary form is purely digital, like MP3s that you could download on your computer and transfer to your iPod.

Put another way: Anybody can tell you what a CD looks like — round, shiny, flat, about yea wide — but nobody knows what an MP3 looks like, because it is a purely digital format. The difference of physicality is the salient part here.

Completely fair point – I was reading "digital" in this context as something ephemeral, like a computer file (mp3s etc.), rather than a physical object such as CD, even though as you say CDs are digital too.

Or maybe "digital" means "mp3 delivered over internet" in this instance.

I don't think anybody realistically considers a CD "digital".

Of course they do, in general—there's nothing analog about CDs. But in this context it clearly meant "digital downloads".

iTunes is 64% of the digital music market and 29% of all music sold in the world. I don't see what's wrong with that statement.

Not to mention the iPod spent a huge amount of time at >90% market share for MP3 players.

I think the author is referring to digital music stored in electronic storage (e.g. flash memory, hard drive) versus physical media (e.g. compact disc).

Sure, the author may of had the right intentions, but in the end after everyone has read that statement there will be plenty of people that take away from it that Apple invented digital music. Wording is important.

I think he's getting at the fact that the iPod and iTunes were what first made people think of music in digital terms. An audio CD might as well be analog as far as people's perception goes, since until MP3 players came around, ripping CDs was not the typical use case.

Is that not what Apple did with the iPod and iTunes? I don't see a problem with that statement

Its bit exaggeration. But come to think of it, we could not clearly state anyone else did more impact to DIGITAL music than Apple.

Actually Fraunhofer did this (the creators of the first mp3 encoder).

Well, they did invent the iPod.