"The iPod has f***ed all of this, in a way. The decade we've just left will never be forgotten."

So says Simon Drake, 24-year-old owner/producer of indie record company Naim Label, who is trying to explain to TechRadar what the last 10 years have done to the music business - a time in which music has seemingly been commoditised, debased and devalued by everything from the X-Factor to CD giveaways, digital downloads and ringtones.

"When iTunes launched in 2005 in the UK in terms of selling music, it's amazing. Even the way they [Apple] dictated price: based on the knowledge that they were going to sell millions of iPods worldwide, saying 'screws you guys, we're going to sell it for 79p a song'. It's changed music. It has accelerated the culture of the under-pricing of music."

Music as a commodity

While 79p sounds like a great deal for the average X-Factor fan, Drake argues that the effect has been to make life much harder for specialised labels like his.

"We don't really shift enough units for iTunes to want to place our business. If all of my album sales were iTunes album sales I would have been out of a job a long time ago. What's happened is that Apple has dictated the price of music to the market, which at the time, was drastically less than it needed to be.

"It's fine if you're a major label, you can find other ways of making money, but we don't licence stuff to TV. We rely on the sales of music to the consumer. That's always been a big issue of mine. I've always been slightly angry that they [Apple] rushed off and set their own price and have dominated the market ever since because it [the iTunes Store] is so easy to use."

And dominate it has. Apple's iTunes Store became the biggest music retailer in the US last year with 25 per cent of all digital and physical music sales. Compare digital downloads alone, and iTunes' dominance rises to 69 per cent of the total US market.

In the UK the situation is arguably even worse, with iTunes share said to be around 90 per cent.

The impact is there for us all to see. Squeezed by supermarkets on the one side and digital downloads on the other, old school record shops have been rapidly disappearing from our high streets, leaving those that remain to focus on other, more profitable, areas instead. Last year HMV said music sales accounted for just 28 per cent of its revenue, a fall of 9 per cent in just two years.

NO-POD: Naim's Simon Drake has forthright views on the impact the iPod has had on the music industry

Another complaint you'll hear from creatives about the iPod and digital downloads is that they've not only devalued the financial currency of music, but they've made it disposable too. Ian Morrow, record producer (Seal, Wet Wet Wet, Lisa Stansfield) and co-founder of Kerchoonz, the social networking and music download site says:

"I was listening to what Warners said about its decision to remove its music from streaming sites and they were talking about the value of music - and the value of music is really important. Just by it being like running water, everywhere all the time, it has no value. It is a complete commodity. There is no 'must go down to the record shop this afternoon, because they'll probably be sold out by Monday'."

That's great if you're a massive music fan who doesn't like paying huge sums for long-deleted albums, but it also means the artefact - the record, the song, the download - no longer has any intrinsic value - at least not to a certain generation.

You can download something one minute and delete it the next - there's no sense of ownership or occasion like you had with a CD or vinyl collection any more.

Short attention spans

"It [the iPod] has become so prevalent in people's live's now that it's really helped accelerate this culture of having a very short attention span," says Naim's Simon Drake.

"In terms of what it does for the music itself? You watch kids on an iPod in a group, they'll play 20 seconds of a song, they'll all scream and laugh, and then they'll change it to the next 20 seconds of another song.

"We're not actually helping develop any love or desire towards music or the thought process behind actually making it. One of my biggest problems, is - as someone from the independent sector who's not trying to make a quick buck - I'm trying to make compelling albums that people will hopefully sit down and enjoy in their entirety.

"I don't think for a minute that Apple thought that was going to be the case. It's human nature, our will to be lazy is becoming ever more present. it's our fault, not Apple's fault."