alt Hacker NewsThe day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
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Always worth remembering that as well as being an innovator, Steve Jobs was often a cruel and petty man.
Apple's playbook has always been to knock technology they don't have as "worthless" (Video Messaging, Copy/Paste on iPhone, ability to play multiple video formats on AppleTV, ability to encode WAV files into Apple AAC/M4P). I get that sitting in the meeting room, one would not want to piss off Steve Jobs. Real money/opportunities are sitting there on the table. But it sure would have been nice to say, "Man, this seems like the type of place that might employ a smart engineer or two.... How about you let me know when they figure out how to convert my dataset into something you can handle". Slide the paperwork back across the table, stand, button my top button of my suit jacket, say, "good day". The outcome would have been the same - Steve still would have changed his story into "we didn't want them". But in your mind, it would have been, "wow, I can't believe converting one format to another was such an arduous task".
>A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote speech about iTunes. People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the competition. They had 400,000 songs while Rhapsody and Napster had over 2 million songs. (Over 500,000 of those were from CD Baby.)
>Four minutes in, he said something that made my pounding heart sink to my burning stomach:
>“This number could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in every song. But we realize that record companies do a great service. They edit! Did you know that if you and I record a song, for $40 we can pay a few of the services to get it on their site, through some intermediaries? We can be on Rhapsody and all these other guys for $40? Well we don’t want to let that stuff on our site! So we’ve had to edit it. And these are 400,000 quality songs.”
In 2003, there were 2 special events with Steve Jobs keynotes about iTunes and he's referring to the 2nd one on October 16, 2003 (deep link to that quote) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvCJ613HORA&t=9m00s
(For trivia reference, the first one was April 28, 2003 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9o46zK5Jo)
>Whoa! Wow. Steve Jobs just dissed me hard! I’m the only one charging $40. That was me he’s referring to!
The author Derek Sivers left a lot of details out but here's how I interpret the situation ...
As prerequisite background, you can categorize "record labels" into 2 groups:
(1) the record label pays the artist for music via "advances", paying upfront recording costs, marketing etc. These are the traditional record labels like Warner, Universal, Sony, Motown, etc that "develop" the artist by making financial bets and losing money on most of the signed roster but making a profit a tiny number.
(2) the artists pay the "record label" -- where these entities are mostly used as a "distribution" intermediary. CD Baby and Tunecore would be typical examples.
Now look at the convoluted process with physical CDs that Apple forced CDBaby and other independents to use:
>The Apple guys said, “Sorry, you need to use this software; there is no other way.”
>Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.
That is basically a form of "proof-of-work". Apple didn't necessarily want everything from CD Baby. Instead, they just wanted the stuff CD Baby thought was worthwhile enough to expend time & effort to mess around with physical CDs.
The big labels didn't have to do that because they already did a form of "proof-of-work" via paying in advance for artists.
The issue is that Derek didn't "read between the lines" to understand what Steve Jobs and the convoluted upload process was trying to accomplish. I suppose business people could just speak plainly so they don't get mixed messages but sometimes they don't.
"we don’t want to let that stuff on our site!"
Me, looking at all the slop on the App Store...
Classic Steve Jobs move. On the absolute limit of ethics for the sake of Apple
After reading this story, I do think Apple is bad, but from a business perspective, it makes sense. (By 'business perspective,' I mean it's immoral but profitable.)
Because if CD Baby was acting as a middleman and a gateway for indie music distribution, Apple's move to shut it out was about preventing power from becoming decentralized and keeping control concentrated in Apple's hands to position iTunes as a premium platform. On top of that, if CD Baby had monopolized the indie music market, any future platform would only need to deal with CD Baby, which would have been a burden down the line.
It was likely a strategy to capture the entire music market. Sometimes I wonder why people don't get as angry at Apple as they do at Microsoft. I don't know what the image is like in the US. Personally, I've always thought Apple's premium strategy is terrible
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I remember when this happened. Apple’s corporate staff screwed up and didn’t have the contract done in time to have the music in by the keynote. And of course they are not going to move the keynote. So Jobs had to spin it: the small number of songs is a good thing, actually!
He was one of the best at this. PowerPC is not keeping up with Intel? Spin it! (Then switch.) Everyone hates DRM? Spin it! (Then drop DRM.) People are nervous about your antenna design? Spin it! And give ‘em a bumper. (But don’t change the antenna.)
What he said publicly was not necessarily a reflection of reality, it was whatever he thought would best position himself and his organization at that moment. In tech they called it a reality distortion field. In politics it’s called a day ending in -y. :-)
Obviously Apple did not have a problem with CD Baby because they did do the contract. And obviously they did not actually have a quality concern about the cheap $40 fee because they kept them even as it went to free.
It’s a classic small business supplier story: the big guys will do what works best for them and the little guy will have to deal with it in order to get the benefit. The most common example is how long most big businesses take to pay their small suppliers. It’s not intentionally malicious, just relative indifference. Like a big truck running over a raccoon because it’s so hard to swerve or stop.