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- Hacker News
- After reading this story, I do think Apple is bad, but from a business perspective, it makes sense. (By 'business perspective,' I mean it's immoral but profitable.)
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
by jdw64 - > By 'business perspective,' I mean it's immoral but profitable.
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.
by danlitt - > Sometimes I wonder why people don't get as angry at Apple as they do at Microsoft.
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.
by vidarh - Classic Steve Jobs move. On the absolute limit of ethics for the sake of Appleby bowsamic
- You mean on the limits of being sued for. Coz this man had zero ethics anywhere in his life unless "being ethical" was somehow correlated with also making money
- On the absolute limit of ethics? This is simply not ethical anymore...by pulse7
- I presume you mean "the maximum physical limit of bad ethics" rather than any particular ethical standard.by danlitt
- What do you mean for the sake of Apple? This didn't benefit Apple. He screwed with this guy for months because of a mistaken idea that the guy should have somehow known Apple's attitude towards secrecy without being told, and after months of messing him about sent him back the signed contract the second he had given up. There was no benefit to Apple here. In fact he harmed Apple by limiting their music collection in the initial stages. It's also not on the limits of ethics. It's unethical.by SilverBirch
- "we don’t want to let that stuff on our site!"
Me, looking at all the slop on the App Store...
by steve1977 - by bookofjoe
- Ruthless.by tim--
- 1 of the 3 qualities one needs to be a successful entrepreneur.by dzonga
- And now remember this whenever you listen to absolutely anything coming out from Apple.
The pattern has been there since the 90s, but younger people fall for it. What they say is primarly PR, and any truth is a happy co-incidence.
by ghusto - >A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote speech about iTunes. People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the competition. They had 400,000 songs while Rhapsody and Napster had over 2 million songs. (Over 500,000 of those were from CD Baby.)
>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.
by jasode - I’m a moonlit musician and this makes a lot of sense to me.by dundercoder
- That's a lot of unpaid mental gymnastics you're doing there to excuse Apple of their trademark shitty behaviour, and it _still_ doesn't negate the very black and white statement: “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.”by ghusto
- You're conflating labels and distributors: for the majors, they are often different department of the same corporations, but they're not the same thing.by shye
- > 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.
by hk1337 - You forgot an important quote: “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.”
It seems pretty unambiguous to me.
by skywal_l - I think it's more likely that the iTunes software was just immature at that point.
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.
by sublinear - Steve Job was a dick and Apple is a horrible company, say it ain't so.
Apple from Jobs to Cook screwed over many. At least Jobs didn't train the Chinese to undercut US manufacturing.
by oldnetguy - Apple's playbook has always been to knock technology they don't have as "worthless" (Video Messaging, Copy/Paste on iPhone, ability to play multiple video formats on AppleTV, ability to encode WAV files into Apple AAC/M4P). I get that sitting in the meeting room, one would not want to piss off Steve Jobs. Real money/opportunities are sitting there on the table. But it sure would have been nice to say, "Man, this seems like the type of place that might employ a smart engineer or two.... How about you let me know when they figure out how to convert my dataset into something you can handle". Slide the paperwork back across the table, stand, button my top button of my suit jacket, say, "good day". The outcome would have been the same - Steve still would have changed his story into "we didn't want them". But in your mind, it would have been, "wow, I can't believe converting one format to another was such an arduous task".by nobleach
- Always worth remembering that as well as being an innovator, Steve Jobs was often a cruel and petty man.by SilverBirch
- dont get to that level without being an asshole.by AlfredBarnes
- to call him an innovator is a slap in the face of everyone who is an actual innovator.
The only thing he was good at as lying to create a brand image.
by ActorNightly - Name a big tech CEO who isn’t.
- The biography regarding how NeXT came to be is quite relevant in how it all went, and how lucky it was that Apple ended up going with NeXT instead of Be.
"Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing"
by pjmlp - And used his wealth to obtain and subsequently waste a liver that could have saved an actual important person with a family.by gosub100
- I read he leased a fresh car every 90 days to keep driving on dealer tags.by ricardobayes
- Is this not a common trait among most of the high-level tech CEOs? We hear of lack of humanity across much of the tech industry when you get up to that level. All the stuff that is said about Musk, and all the others.by jb1991