By NYU Staff

It’s impossible to be on a New York City subway without swimming in a veritable sea of iPods, on which people play music for which they used to pay an arm and leg. In the past five years,  Apple’s iPod and iTunes have wreaked havoc on the traditional music industry business model as consumers got used to getting their music through the Internet. The same thing is happening with journalism, though the effect on the media model has taken a little while longer to become evident.

Everything's digital in the age of iPods

In 2008 alone, revenue from music sold online, on mobile phones and in other digital forms, rose by 25%, to $3.7 billion, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Digital sales accounted for 20% of the industry’s revenue, up from 15% in 2007.

“The industry has shifted to Plan B,” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research. “The record companies have realized that the only way they can fight free is with free itself,” he said in a New York Times article.

Free is the word, and once the consumer gets used to getting something for free, it’s hard to go back. The same goes for journalism, and the hunt for monetization has been on while layoffs and closings continue.

Going back to Apple: The company has a way of making its products both ascetically and technologically attractive — pretty on the outside, brilliant on the inside. So when the company announced its intention to develop an e-reader, it seems it may be only a matter of time before not only are iPods and iPhones everywhere, but the so-called Apple Tablet as well.

Apple chief executive Jobs, back from a liver transplant, began working on the Tablet in earnest this year, according to an August 25 Wall Street Journal article. Apple then put in for a new patent improving digital ink recognition technique for the pen-aware tablet, only adding to rumors that the company is soon to release a Kindle competitor. Right now, Amazon expects 70% of revenue from the newspapers and magazine it carries on Kindle. They have the upper hand for the time being while the journalistic outfits figure out how to carry its own content.

The same is and was said for the music labels — iTunes had the upper hand, and in lieu on 0% profit, the record labels took what Apple gave them.

“Apple has a way of catching onto what people want, so I’d be pretty confident about what they come up with, but it’s all about who gets there first right now,” said Gregory Melich, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

So it doesn’t seem so far off then that soon there’ll be a sea of Apple Tablets on the New York City subway – along with an iPod or two.