Steve Jobs

much of my time trying to convince people to do the right thing for themselves,” he recalled. Because the companies were worried about the pricing model and unbundling of albums, Jobs pitched that his new service would be only on the Macintosh, a mere 5% of the market. They could try the idea with little risk. “We used our small market share to our advantage by arguing that if the store turned out to be destructive it wouldn’t destroy the entire universe,” he recalled.
    Jobs’s proposal was to sell digital songs for 99 cents—a simple and impulsive purchase. The record companies would get 70 cents of that.Jobs insisted that this would be more appealing than the monthly subscription model preferred by the music companies. He believed that people had an emotional connection to the songs they loved. They wanted to
own
“Sympathy for the Devil” and “Shelter from the Storm,” not just rent them. As he told Jeff Goodell of
Rolling Stone
at the time, “I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.”
    Jobs also insisted that the iTunes Store would sell individual songs, not just entire albums. That ended up being the biggest cause of conflict with the record companies, which made money by putting out albums that had two or three great songs and a dozen or so fillers; to get the song they wanted, consumers had to buy the whole album. Some musicians objected on artistic grounds to Jobs’s plan to disaggregate albums. “There’s a flow to a good album,” said Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. “The songs support each other. That’s the way I like to make music.” But the objections were moot. “Piracy and online downloads had already deconstructed the album,” recalled Jobs. “You couldn’t compete with piracy unless you sold the songs individually.”
    At the heart of the problem was a chasm between the people who loved technology and those who loved artistry. Jobs loved both, as he had demonstrated at Pixar and Apple, and he was thus positioned to bridge the gap. He later explained:
When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don’t understand creativity. They don’t appreciate
intuitive
thinking, like the ability of an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have a feel for which five might be successful. And they think that creative people just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they’ve not seen how driven and disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are. On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We’d get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.
     
    Jobs had a long relationship with Barry Schuler, the CEO of the AOL unit of Time Warner, and began to pick his brain about how to get the music labels into the proposed iTunes Store. “Piracy is flipping everyone’s circuit breakers,” Schuler told him. “You should use the argument that because you have an integrated end-to-end service, from iPods to the store, you can best protect how the music is used.”
    One day in March 2002, Schuler got a call from Jobs and decided to conference-in Vidich. Jobs asked Vidich if he would come to Cupertino and bring the head of Warner Music, Roger Ames. This time Jobs was charming. Ames was a sardonic, fun, and clever Brit, a type (such as James Vincent and Jony Ive) that Jobs tended to like. So the Good Steve was on display. At one point early in the meeting, Jobs even played the unusual role of diplomat. Ames and Eddy Cue, who ran iTunes for Apple, got into an argument over why radio in England was not as vibrant as in the United States, and Jobs stepped in, saying, “We know about tech, but we don’t know as much about music, so let’s not argue.”
    Ames had just lost a boardroom battle to have his corporation’s AOL division improve its own fledgling music download service. “When I did a digital download using AOL, I could never find the song on my shitty computer,” he recalled. So when Jobs demonstrated a prototype of the iTunes Store, Ames was impressed. “Yes, yes,