What was the first song to top the iTunes chart?
Apple Music‘s iTunes changed everything within the industry, and that’s no exaggeration.
When launched in 2001, it was dubbed the ‘World’s Best and Easiest To Use Jukebox Software’ as it arrived at the very dawn of online streaming services or digital music downloads. Suddenly, history’s entire musical library was there and available in a way it never had been before.
In the 2022 documentary Meet Me In The Bathroom, directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern decided to address this moment in time by saying nothing at all. Instead, they let the music video for LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Losing My Edge’ play in its entirety, a tune in which James Murphy, having come up in a pre-digital age, shares his fear of the new dawn. He’d needed to dig through crates to find old and rare tunes, but now, suddenly, he was singing, “The kids are coming up from behind”, stressing, “I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978”.
iTunes played a major role in this change, and while Spotify and other streaming services would come along later and make access to music feel like a free right, even if you’re paying for a subscription, the former was the first step. Fans no longer needed to go out and buy CDs or vinyl and could purchase music right to their device, meaning that it required way less effort, which was obviously going to impact sales in a different way.
In 2003, iTunes launched a way to reflect that. While the classic charts like the Billboard top 100 or the UK’s top 40 have come to amalgamate physical sales with digital ones, the iTunes chart is specific to only that platform and reflects the sales made right there. Sure, if one tune is completely and utterly taking off, chances are it will dominate across the board, but on iTunes, with a more streamlined way of calculating the top tracks, things change quicker when there are more specific metrics involved.
So, what was the first-ever number one on the iTunes chart?
After launching on April 28th, 2003, the platform wasted no time.
Previously, they had never included any kind of ranking feature, but from that date in 2003, an ever-changing, constantly evolving chart has sat front and centre, and in the first instance, U2’s ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ was crowned number one. It was pretty random, given that the single had been out for some time, and the album that housed it had been around even longer, with All That You Can’t Leave Behind released back in 2000, but U2 seemed to always have big plans for iTunes.
The song peaked in 2003 because the band specifically re-released an iTunes exclusive version, having been tipped off about this chart launching, so the version that topped the chart was actually an acoustic rerecording that was only available on the platform.
Later down the line, the band would do their infamous and odd move of automatically adding their 2014 album Songs of Innocence to every iTunes account for free, but for a long time, even before that, the band and the Apple music library were in cahoots.
