With the music industry suing hundreds of school valedictorians, business professionals and other seemingly upstanding citizens over the use of file-swapping Web sites like KaZaA, Morpheus, and Napster, music-lovers are flocking to legitimate sites such as Apple iTunes for legal music downloads. Apple's marketing planning in recent years has proven to be sheer genius, as the company's new iPod and iTunes products are well on the way to making Apple the world's largest online music distribution company.

Apple is a tech-industry icon, and is best known for its legendary Macintosh and iMac computers from the '80s and '90s. Although the company surrendered most of its share of the computer and software market to rivals IBM and Microsoft in the past decade, CEO Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple's strategists have managed to develop new niches to expand the company's reach.

Using Apple's iTunes, consumers can browse through over 200,000 songs from any major record company, download each of the Web for 99 cents, and listen to the songs on the iPod portable music player or any other device that can record and play back the file format offered by Apple.

In light of the music industry's decision to use aggressive legal action to stamp out online music piracy, Apple's strategy to reposition the company for legal online music distribution was nothing less than clairvoyant.