Steve Jobs

the first six days after it was introduced in April 2003, the store went on to sell seventy million songs in its first year. In February 2006 the store sold its one billionth song when Alex Ostrovsky, sixteen, of West Bloomfield, Michigan, bought Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” and got a congratulatory call from Jobs, bestowing upon him ten iPods, an iMac, and a $10,000 music gift certificate.
    The success of the iTunes Store also had a more subtle benefit. By 2011 an important new business had emerged: being the service that people trusted with their online identity and payment information. Along with Amazon, Visa, PayPal, American Express, and a few other services, Apple had built up databases of people who trusted them with their email address and credit card information to facilitate safe and easy shopping. This allowed Apple to sell, for example, a magazine subscription through its online store; when that happened, Apple, not the magazine publisher, would have a direct relationship with the subscriber. As the iTunes Store sold videos, apps, and subscriptions, it built up a database of 225 million active users by June 2011, which positioned Apple for the next age of digital commerce.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

     

MUSIC MAN
     
    The Sound Track of His Life
     

     
    Jimmy Iovine, Bono, Jobs, and The Edge, 2004
     
    On His iPod
    As the iPod phenomenon grew, it spawned a question that was asked of presidential candidates, B-list celebrities, first dates, the queen of England, and just about anyone else with white earbuds: “What’s on your iPod?” The parlor game took off when Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a piece in the
New York Times
in early 2005 dissecting the answer that President George W. Bush gave when she asked him that question. “Bush’s iPod is heavy on traditional country singers,” she reported. “He has selections by Van Morrison, whose ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably ‘Centerfield.’” She gota
Rolling Stone
editor, Joe Levy, to analyze the selection, and he commented, “One thing that’s interesting is that the president likes artists who don’t like him.”
    “Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book,” Steven Levy wrote in
The Perfect Thing
. “All somebody needs to do is scroll through your library on that click wheel, and, musically speaking, you’re naked. It’s not just what you like—it’s
who you are.
” So one day, when we were sitting in his living room listening to music, I asked Jobs to let me see his. As we sat there, he flicked through his favorite songs.
    Not surprisingly, there were all six volumes of Dylan’s bootleg series, including the tracks Jobs had first started worshipping when he and Wozniak were able to score them on reel-to-reel tapes years before the series was officially released. In addition, there were fifteen other Dylan albums, starting with his first,
Bob Dylan
(1962), but going only up to
Oh Mercy
(1989). Jobs had spent a lot of time arguing with Andy Hertzfeld and others that Dylan’s subsequent albums, indeed any of his albums after
Blood on the Tracks
(1975), were not as powerful as his early performances. The one exception he made was Dylan’s track “Things Have Changed” from the 2000 movie
Wonder Boys.
Notably his iPod did not include
Empire Burlesque
(1985), the album that Hertzfeld had brought him the weekend he was ousted from Apple.
    The other great trove on his iPod was the Beatles. He included songs from seven of their albums:
A Hard Day’s Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, Meet the Beatles!
and
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. The solo albums missed the cut. The Rolling Stones clocked in next, with six albums:
Emotional Rescue, Flashpoint, Jump Back, Some Girls, Sticky Fingers
, and
Tattoo You
. In the case of the Dylan and the Beatles albums, most were included in their entirety. But true to his belief that albums can and should be disaggregated, those of the Stones and most other artists on his iPod included only three or four cuts. His onetime girlfriend Joan Baez was amply represented by selections from four albums, including two different versions of “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word.”
    His iPod selections were those of a kid from the seventies withhis heart in the sixties. There were Aretha, B. B. King, Buddy Holly, Buffalo Springfield, Don