Steve Jobs: interview about buying music online

December 18, 2014 5:01 PM

In April 2003, the day after Steve Jobs announced the iTunes store, Esquire's Andy Langer interviewed Jobs at Apple. Although Jobs cut the interview short after less than twenty minutes, it's nevertheless an interesting read, as is Langer's more recent recollection of the interview.
posted by paleyellowwithorange (15 comments total)

The essay about the interview is actually a more interesting read than the interview itself in many regards.
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:02 PM on December 18, 2014

Bill Burr basically sums up my view. Seriously - I assume Steve Jobs had very little to do with "inventing" anything. Didn't his employees just bring him ideas and he gave thumbs up or thumbs down or said make it thinner or whatever? (I am seriously asking.)
posted by vorpal bunny at 7:08 PM on December 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

The worst kinda dick is the one that's right. I think that's the problem with Steve Jobs.
posted by valkane at 7:12 PM on December 18, 2014 [11 favorites]

A few moments later, Steve Jobs reaches over and turns off the tape recorder. He seems uncomfortable talking further about this marriage between music and technology, and about his new partners, the record labels

Right, after that astonishingly bizarre and antagonistic interview, right. The interviewer can fuck right off.
posted by uraniumwilly at 7:21 PM on December 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

I feel like he expressed an insight that modern media companies still don't quite grasp (whether he truly believed it or not: that people were "stealing" music because the best internet acquisition method was illegal. If the best solution is illegal you can't really blame people for using it. If you make your legal one as good or better, then people will use that (and people do - I am sure lots of music is still stolen but man oh man, tons of people buy songs from apple and google and amazon, including me (who in the past had definitely used kazaa and napster)). And the easier they make it, the more I buy.

We're still in this weird balkanized state with TV shows and movies. I'd like to buy this thing, but not on your terms. Make your offering the best way to get your tv shows and people will pay you for them.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:40 PM on December 18, 2014 [5 favorites]

Right, after that astonishingly bizarre and antagonistic interview, right. The interviewer can fuck right off.

Apple Records agreed to not sue Apple Computer on the condition that they don't try to enter the music industry.

Jobs had just announced that Apple was basically entering the music industry. He's trying not to be on record saying something that'll get them sued (and sure enough, Apple Records did just that):

JOBS: We're not a media company. We don't own media. We don't own music. We don't own films or television. We're not a media company. We're just Apple.

posted by neckro23 at 7:52 PM on December 18, 2014 [5 favorites]

uraniumwilly, was that sarcasm? I didn't see anything at all antagonistic in that interview. At worst, I could say that it wasn't entirely obsequious.

It really makes Steve look like a total dick to me just abruptly ending it like that. Neckro23's point about not yet having been sued by the music business Apple at least gives some plausible explanation for it, though.
posted by wierdo at 8:09 PM on December 18, 2014

Right, after that astonishingly bizarre and antagonistic interview, right. The interviewer can fuck right off.

These are not necessarily softball questions, but they're far from out of line, especially for the moment when they were asked. Journalists are not obligated to ask the questions an interviewee wants to hear.
posted by brennen at 8:10 PM on December 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

That seems like a very calm and measured interview - I don't think it was combative at all. It's the job of a good interviewer to ask incisive questions, and there were a lot of doubts in the air right after iTunes launched. It seems like Steve Jobs was not the sort of guy who gave long, splendid interviews anyway - he could dazzle in a presentation, but his thinking was far enough ahead that I think he preferred to just act and let the pieces fall into place. And he knew that; that's why he was smart enough to cut this off after 19 minutes.
posted by koeselitz at 8:13 PM on December 18, 2014

after that astonishingly bizarre and antagonistic interview

That's not an astonishingly bizarre and antagonistic interview. This is an astonishingly bizarre and antagonistic interview.
posted by flabdablet at 8:31 PM on December 18, 2014

I think Jobs was an asshole and yet he was very reasonable in that interview.
posted by mlis at 8:47 PM on December 18, 2014

uraniumwilly, was that sarcasm?

No. I'm sure I overreacted.

From the interview: Doesn't there have to be a change in thinking to get that fifteen-year-old to buy the core premise here — paying ninety-nine cents a song?

It just struck me, I think, in hindsight, that this was just such a preposterous question, among others.
posted by uraniumwilly at 8:55 PM on December 18, 2014

That's not a preposterous question - that's the core question the music industry could never answer. While it had a choke-hold on distribution, then "what are we giving the punters that's worth their money?" was otiose. The answer was "the music", but it turns out that it doesn't actually cost $13.99 for an album or even 99c/track to do that. When that's obvious to fifteen year old boys, you're really not going to get very far on karma alone.

The tech industry knew that, and furthermore wasn't invested in keeping the distribution channels going so that there were still flowers in the LA boardrooms. Quite the opposite. That's the tension that glows through the cracks in this interview, and that question is bang on target.

(There's going to be a lot more about this coming out of the Sony slow-motion doxx explosion. Is any large organisation resistant to Snowdenite?

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.)
posted by Devonian at 2:49 AM on December 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

ESQ: They've been characterized in the conventional wisdom as dinosaurs — dumb and slow in reacting to digital media.
JOBS: You use the word "they" a lot — "they" and "them" — and who has power over whom. I don't think that way.

AH ha ha ha hah. All Jobs ever had was power. Obviously he rarely strayed in front of a mirror.
The main difference between Jobs and Edison is that Edison actually invented a couple things before he hired hundreds of people to do that for him.
Meanwhile, the guy who actually hand-made the innovative and damn-well-made computers that made the company take off isn't the subject of any movies.

And that - right there - is a trenchant indictment of what's happened to the US of A.
posted by Twang at 7:53 AM on December 19, 2014 [2 favorites]

Not only does it not seem like a particularly antagonistic interview, but I get the impression that, over a decade later, Andy Langer still hasn't quite caught up to Jobs. He leads with, "Last night, I listened to Steve Jobs describe me as a primitive thinker", but here's the actual part of the interview in question:

ESQ: The[ record labels have] been characterized in the conventional wisdom as dinosaurs — dumb and slow in reacting to digital media.

JOBS: You use the word "they" a lot — "they" and "them" — and who has power over whom. I don't think that way.

ESQ: Okay?

JOBS: I think that's kind of a primitive way of thinking. We didn't approach it that way at all.

Langer is not getting what Jobs was getting at, which is that, even though he's just taken pains to explain why the record labels' previous attempts at online music stores failed, he's still working with them, not around or against them, and that defining them as "dinosaurs — dumb and slow" is not going to get that done. There are a lot of people in tech who would have taken the bait and said, yeah, they're the dinosaurs and we're the meteor headed toward the Yucatan, and that may be why it was Apple who changed the business model and not them. And Jobs may have been that kind of person back in the day, but if Langer was going off the 1984 playbook, it's no wonder that Jobs cut it short.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:22 AM on December 19, 2014 [2 favorites]