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Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
He was one of the best at this. PowerPC is not keeping up with Intel? Spin it! (Then switch.) Everyone hates DRM? Spin it! (Then drop DRM.) People are nervous about your antenna design? Spin it! And give ‘em a bumper. (But don’t change the antenna.)
What he said publicly was not necessarily a reflection of reality, it was whatever he thought would best position himself and his organization at that moment. In tech they called it a reality distortion field. In politics it’s called a day ending in -y. :-)
Obviously Apple did not have a problem with CD Baby because they did do the contract. And obviously they did not actually have a quality concern about the cheap $40 fee because they kept them even as it went to free.
It’s a classic small business supplier story: the big guys will do what works best for them and the little guy will have to deal with it in order to get the benefit. The most common example is how long most big businesses take to pay their small suppliers. It’s not intentionally malicious, just relative indifference. Like a big truck running over a raccoon because it’s so hard to swerve or stop.
>Four minutes in, he said something that made my pounding heart sink to my burning stomach:
>“This number could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in every song. But we realize that record companies do a great service. They edit! Did you know that if you and I record a song, for $40 we can pay a few of the services to get it on their site, through some intermediaries? We can be on Rhapsody and all these other guys for $40? Well we don’t want to let that stuff on our site! So we’ve had to edit it. And these are 400,000 quality songs.”
In 2003, there were 2 special events with Steve Jobs keynotes about iTunes and he's referring to the 2nd one on October 16, 2003 (deep link to that quote) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvCJ613HORA&t=9m00s
(For trivia reference, the first one was April 28, 2003 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9o46zK5Jo)
>Whoa! Wow. Steve Jobs just dissed me hard! I’m the only one charging $40. That was me he’s referring to!
The author Derek Sivers left a lot of details out but here's how I interpret the situation ...
As prerequisite background, you can categorize "record labels" into 2 groups:
(1) the record label pays the artist for music via "advances", paying upfront recording costs, marketing etc. These are the traditional record labels like Warner, Universal, Sony, Motown, etc that "develop" the artist by making financial bets and losing money on most of the signed roster but making a profit a tiny number.
(2) the artists pay the "record label" -- where these entities are mostly used as a "distribution" intermediary. CD Baby and Tunecore would be typical examples.
Now look at the convoluted process with physical CDs that Apple forced CDBaby and other independents to use:
>The Apple guys said, “Sorry, you need to use this software; there is no other way.”
>Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.
That is basically a form of "proof-of-work". Apple didn't necessarily want everything from CD Baby. Instead, they just wanted the stuff CD Baby thought was worthwhile enough to expend time & effort to mess around with physical CDs.
The big labels didn't have to do that because they already did a form of "proof-of-work" via paying in advance for artists.
The issue is that Derek didn't "read between the lines" to understand what Steve Jobs and the convoluted upload process was trying to accomplish. I suppose business people could just speak plainly so they don't get mixed messages but sometimes they don't.
When you’re putting out a message to a large amount of people, no matter how much time and effort you spend trying to get the words just right so everyone understands, there’s always going to someone that misunderstands it and gets offended.
What you're describing is a nice side effect of that for Apple, but the reality is they're not going to do the bitch work of importing all those songs from a hodge podge of whatever formats they're given. They didn't have a better tool available at that time to make their catalog consistent.
It's very believable that Apple felt enough urgency to rush this phase.
I have to assume you and the author (at that time) aren't familiar enough with the corporate world to realize all discussions containing privileged information (contract details that would never get a press release) are confidential by default.
Of course Apple would never think they'd have to explain this. It's a reasonable expectation for them to have.
Because if CD Baby was acting as a middleman and a gateway for indie music distribution, Apple's move to shut it out was about preventing power from becoming decentralized and keeping control concentrated in Apple's hands to position iTunes as a premium platform. On top of that, if CD Baby had monopolized the indie music market, any future platform would only need to deal with CD Baby, which would have been a burden down the line.
It was likely a strategy to capture the entire music market. Sometimes I wonder why people don't get as angry at Apple as they do at Microsoft. I don't know what the image is like in the US. Personally, I've always thought Apple's premium strategy is terrible
Apple was the underdog at a point where Microsoft got its bad image by virtue of it's monopolistic practice. I can't help but think that a lot of it is a combination of inertia and MS pissing off a sufficient subset of geeks at a point where we made up a much larger proportion of the online discourse and so could set the tone. And for at least a time, in part by virtue of MS bad reputation, a subset of geeks saw Apple as a possible saviour.
It also helps that for all of its calculated business behaviour, Apple also has a reputation for better quality that makes people want to give them passes for things MS wouldn't get a pass for.
At least Apple's destructiveness was mostly related to market realities and their own product (still waiting for a replacement for my Newton MessagePad --- my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ sort of works (but not daylight viewable), my Kindle Scribe ColourSoft is quite nice, but way too limited and no 3rd party apps other than what can be done via PDFs or HTML)).
So, the purest form of evil there is?
> Sometimes I wonder why people don't get as angry at Apple as they do at Microsoft.
They are indeed just as bad as each other. I think Microsoft just got unlucky and had a lot of bad-PR emails leak. If that had happened at Apple he'd probably have someone killed.