alt Hacker NewsYou forgot an important quote: “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.”
It seems pretty unambiguous to me.
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steve1977 • today at 2:14 PM
This. I'm pretty sure the major labels were not at this meeting and it was only indies.
>It seems pretty unambiguous to me.
It's ambiguous and a contradiction because I think it's just an example of Steve Jobs saying one thing but his actual actions say something else.
In his "full persuasion mode" (as Derek puts it), he says he "wants all their music" to make the indies feel good ... but forcing them do the physical CD ripping and entering metadata is really the final authority on what he really wanted at the time.
He didn't make the big labels jump through hoops like that. He signed Sony just a few weeks before the iTunes Store went live in April 2003 with 200,000 songs. Sony and all the previous big labels just did digital uploads of their catalog instead of ripping CDs like cavemen. For the 2nd-phase rollout of iTunes Store in October 2003 with 400,000 songs, Apple could have had CD Baby and other small indies use the same effortless transfer process as the Big Labels but for whatever reason, Steve Jobs treated them differently.
So... "If Steve supposedly wants _all_ our music, why is he making us manually load CDs?!?" ... well... maybe you can't take everything Steve says at face value? Likewise, charging $40-entrance-to-iTunes breaks another "unwritten rule" that Steve disapproved of. Same as the "unwritten NDA" Steve never had anyone sign or agree to.