Steve Jobs on the Music Industry
Published December 10, 2003
They didn't see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying, "No, we want that — we want a subscription business."
Slowly but surely, as these things didn't pan out, we started to gain some credibility with these folks.
Lately, the recording industry has been threatening to throw anyone caught illegally downloading music in jail. Is that a smart approach?
Well, I empathize with them. I mean, Apple has a lot of intellectual property, and we really get upset when people steal our software, too. So I think that they're within their rights to try to keep people from stealing their product.
Our position from the beginning has been that eighty percent of the people stealing music online don't really want to be thieves. But that is such a compelling way to get music. It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves — without a legal alternative that offers those same benefits — rings hollow. We said, "We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves unless you can offer them a carrot — not just a stick." And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song.
The other thing we told the record companies was that if you go to Kazaa to download a song, the experience is not very good. You type in a song name, you don't get back a song — you get a hundred, on a hundred different computers. You try to download one, and, you know, the person has a slow connection, and it craps out. And after two or three have crapped out, you finally download a song, and four seconds are cut off, because it was encoded by a ten-year-old. By the time you get your song, it's taken fifteen minutes. So that means you can download four an hour. Now some people are willing to do that. But a lot of people aren't.
David Bowie predicted that, because of the Internet and piracy, copyright is going to be dead in ten years. Do you agree?
Craig Lyndall rants, raves and writes other stuff at FilteringCraig.com and at The Cleveland Sports Curse
- Steve Jobs on the Music Industry
- Published: December 10, 2003
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- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Internet, Culture: Media, Sci/Tech: Software, Music: News
- Writer: Craig Lyndall
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Comments on this articleComments
I was amazed when I downloaded ITunes at what a great library manager it is as well. It is far and away the best way to manage different playlists and also to create mix cd's from all my MP3's. I didn't know that the experience could be that good, but it is.
What's with Jobs flat-out lying about the customes the other services have, though? He claims 50,000 forall the otherservices combined - there are hundreds of thousands.
Also, he dismsses the subscription model, which I think will end up being what the masses latch onto.
The only thing I can think of for you first question is that the interview was done a little while ago, or he is lying.
Also, I don't know about the subscription model either. I think there are a whole lot of people who want to get their stuff a download at a time. Plus that is also what makes the profits easy to trace and filter back to the appropriate parties. I guess with the subscription model you could do statistics to make sure people were paid properly, but it seems simpler with the individual download to me.
i hate the subscription model with a passion. The only truly helpful and best value subscription model is the one used by magazines.
I don't want to be locked into something if i decide several months before my subscription ends that i don;t want to use it anymore. Or if i forget about it for a long period of time, or simply cannot make us of it (e.g. if my pc breaks and doesn't get fixed for a few weeks)
The point about never being able to fully protect digital content is part of a larger, more general truism - it's impossible to develop a fully secure copy protection system for digital content of any kind, because there will always be people determined to break copy protection and invariably, because none of it is perfect, cracks are found
Yes, but with 60 million people now used to getting what they want, when they want it for free, the closer a pay system is to that, the better they will do, I think.
i've gotta agree with eric here.
kids are used to downloading stuff for free....and having to pay per download will not add to the experience. it seems like it'd be much more convenient to pay once and then forget it.
this coming from a guy who has no interest in downloading aside from the occasional "what that person sound like" kind of thing (and a subscription model would support that...at least for me).
I think the key is to make it "feel like free"
yea, that's right.
i used to use napster to do just the kind of sampling i spoke of (more often than not leading to a cd purchase).
i don't use kazaa at all because it's a pain in the ass (at least to me).
if there was a service that had a reasonable subscription fee (and was easy to use), then i'd probably sign up.
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I agree with a lot of what was said in that article. I used to use KAAZA and Napster because I wanted the CHOICE. If I only wanted one song, I wanted ONE song. Now with iTunes I get everything I want. I pay for it, and am glad to pay for a service I want.
Artists like the Beatles who refuse to allow their stuff on iTunes are stuck in the past and don't get it.