Steve Jobs

getting ripped off by free downloading, they liked what we were doing with iTunes, and they thought we could promote them to a younger audience.”
    Any other CEO would have jumped into a mosh pit to have U2in an ad, but Jobs pushed back a bit. Apple didn’t feature recognizable people in the iPod ads, just silhouettes. (The Dylan ad had not yet been made.) “You have silhouettes of fans,” Bono replied, “so couldn’t the next phase be silhouettes of artists?” Jobs said it sounded like an idea worth exploring. Bono left a copy of the unreleased album,
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
, for Jobs to hear. “He was the only person outside the band who had it,” Bono said.
    A round of meetings ensued. Jobs flew down to talk to Jimmy Iovine, whose Interscope records distributed U2, at his house in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. The Edge was there, along with U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness. Another meeting took place in Jobs’s kitchen, with McGuinness writing down the deal points in the back of his diary. U2 would appear in the commercial, and Apple would vigorously promote the album in multiple venues, ranging from billboards to the iTunes homepage. The band would get no direct fee, but it would get royalties from the sale of a special U2 edition of the iPod. Bono believed, like Lack, that the musicians should get a royalty on each iPod sold, and this was his small attempt to assert the principle in a limited way for his band. “Bono and I asked Steve to make us a black one,” Iovine recalled. “We weren’t just doing a commercial sponsorship, we were making a co-branding deal.”
    “We wanted our own iPod, something distinct from the regular white ones,” Bono recalled. “We wanted black, but Steve said, ‘We’ve tried other colors than white, and they don’t work.’” A few days later Jobs relented and accepted the idea, tentatively.
    The commercial interspersed high-voltage shots of the band in partial silhouette with the usual silhouette of a dancing woman listening to an iPod. But even as it was being shot in London, the agreement with Apple was unraveling. Jobs began having second thoughts about the idea of a special black iPod, and the royalty rates were not fully pinned down. He called James Vincent, at Apple’s ad agency, and told him to call London and put things on hold. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Jobs said. “They don’t realize how much value we are giving them, it’s going south. Let’s think of some other ad to do.” Vincent, a lifelong U2 fan, knew how big the ad would be, both for the band and Apple, and begged for the chance to call Bono to try to get things ontrack. Jobs gave him Bono’s mobile number, and he reached the singer in his kitchen in Dublin.
    Bono was also having a few second thoughts. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he told Vincent. “The band is reluctant.” Vincent asked what the problem was. “When we were teenagers in Dublin, we said we would never do naff stuff,” Bono replied. Vincent, despite being British and familiar with rock slang, said he didn’t know what that meant. “Doing rubbishy things for money,” Bono explained. “We are all about our fans. We feel like we’d be letting them down if we went in an ad. It doesn’t feel right. I’m sorry we wasted your time.”
    Vincent asked what more Apple could do to make it work. “We are giving you the most important thing we have to give, and that’s our music,” said Bono. “And what are you giving us back? Advertising, and our fans will think it’s for you. We need something more.” Vincent replied that the offer of the special U2 edition of the iPod and the royalty arrangement was a huge deal. “That’s the most prized thing we have to give,” he told Bono.
    The singer said he was ready to try to put the deal back together, so Vincent immediately called Jony Ive, another big U2 fan (he had first seen them in concert in Newcastle in 1983), and described the situation. Then he called Jobs and suggested he send Ive to Dublin to show what the black iPod would look like. Jobs agreed. Vincent called Bono back, and asked if he knew Jony Ive, unaware that they had met before and admired each other. “Know Jony Ive?” Bono laughed. “I love that guy. I drink his bathwater.”
    “That’s a bit strong,” Vincent replied, “but how about letting him come visit and show how cool your iPod would be?”
    “I’m going to pick him up myself in my