Steve Jobs wasn’t just a visionary when it came to making revolutionary tech products like the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone, he was also a mastermind of merging technology and creativity by finding the A-list players in both fields and creating an environment where they could work together to make the best possible products.
A famous example of how well this worked out for Jobs can be seen in Toy Story (one of the most well-known movies on the planet which was created by Pixar - a company owned by Jobs). Another great example of Jobs’s ability to merge creativity and technology can be seen in the creation of iTunes and the partnerships and digital music sales that followed shortly after.
Current Book & Quotes From: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Revolutionizing the Music Industry - The iTunes Store
The iTunes store sparked a major revolution in the music industry and in the tech product industry. Jobs’s genius ability to merge technology and creativity allowed him to create an unstoppable business model.
The business model would end up focusing on selling digital music, which would drive the sales of iPods. The sales of iPods would then drive the sales of Apple computers which would continue to drive more sales to digital music. I couldn’t dream of a better business model than what Jobs cooked up back in 2002 when he set out to revolutionize the music industry:
“At the beginning of 2002 Apple faced a challenge. The seamless connection between your iPod, iTunes software, and computer made it easy to manage the music you already owned. But to get new music, you had to venture out of this cozy environment and go buy a CD or download the songs online. The latter endeavor usually meant foraying into the murky domains of file-sharing and piracy services. So Jobs wanted to offer iPod users a way to download songs that was simple, safe, and legal.”
“So Jobs set out to create an “iTunes Store” and to persuade the five top record companies to allow digital versions of their songs to be sold there. “I’ve never spent so much of my time trying to convince people to do the right thing for themselves,” he recalled.”
It’s really funny to me that Jobs had to actually spend weeks on end trying to convince the record companies to sell digital versions of their songs. It’s pretty obvious that everything was moving to digital and that consumers were going to buy less and less physical copies of music. This really shows the power of being able to be both creative and technologically inclined - the record companies were more creative than technical and thus, they couldn’t recognize the movement of the market to being focused on digital sales rather than physical sales. Jobs was able to relate to these companies by sharing his creative side and then he was able to bring the technology to the forefront for these executives and really show them what the future would look like.
“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”
Interestingly enough, I feel that we’ve actually reversed the music industry over time. A lot of consumers now prefer the subscription-based model offered by companies such as Spotify, Youtube Red and now Apple Music as well. The technology just wasn’t good enough at the time when Jobs was creating the foundations of the iTunes store to offer a fully streamable subscription option like what’s available today.
Here's the Question of The Day, don't forget to post your answers in the comments!
What 2 industries or areas of expertise do you think you could potentially merge together to create something revolutionary?
Thanks for reading! Don't forget to leave your thoughts below and I look forward to seeing you in the comments!
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