Apple: Don’t Forget the Music
Last week, Apple presented its first keynote presentation after becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company. I bet even Tim Cook was thinking, Gee whiz, that’s a lot of money. So why did he forget the music?
Remember music?
“As you know, Apple was founded to make the computer more personal, of course, first with the Apple II and then later with the Mac,” Cook said in his opening speech at the Steve Jobs Theater. He continued, almost perfunctorily, “We’ve created several categories of technology that have had a profound impact on people’s lives, from the iPod, to the iPhone, to the iPad, to the Apple Watch.”
The rest of the day focused on presentations from the iPhone team (photos so clean they were featured on the cover of Time!) and the lifesaving technology of the Apple Watch (certified by the FDA to measure your heart rate for blood pressure and abnormal rhythms!).
But speaking of abnormal rhythms: Remember music?
A lot of us out here do. Eliot Van Buskirk tells the story in his 2012 piece “Without Music, Apple Would Be Nothing”: “Eleven years ago, I watched Steve Jobs unveil the iPod at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. The following week, I made my best prediction to date: that descendants of the iPod would replace the PC, as they are now doing.” Anyone writing about technology or music in the early 2000s will praise the revolution brought on by the iPod, a revolution that extended beyond Apple. In 2006, Wired editor Steven Levy wrote an entire book about the iPod, naming it “the most familiar, and certainly the most desirable new object of the twenty-first century.” New Yorker classical music editor Alex Ross thought it would change the way we listen to music. “It seems to me that a lot of younger listeners think the way the iPod thinks. They are no longer so invested in a single genre, one that promises to mold their being or save the world.”
Remember iPod?
I remember my first iPod. It was Fourth Generation — no dedicated buttons, no color screen, a gift from my dad, significant in that it cost more than $20 and had nothing to do with food. I used it all the way through college, every single day, up until the moment the gel screen presented me with a frownie face to mark its sudden passing. It now seems primitive, that black-and-grey screen, Chicago font, holding a paltry 40,000 songs in its metal shell weighing nearly as much as my hand. On my phone right now, which is so light I often mistake it for my wallet, I have access to millions of songs, videos, games, photos, and apps.
It has been quite a journey from iPod to iPhone, and I don’t blame anyone for taking this story for granted. Still, if this history can be taken at face value, there is no doubt that Apple’s conquest of the marketplace began with music. The Macintosh made Apple profitable, but the iPod made Apple hot. Steven Levy writes that, at the time of the iPod’s release in 2001, the Mac only had a 4% share of the PC marketplace. “To that end, the iPod was seen as somewhat of a breakthrough, a significant one with the potential to nudge the company in a new direction.” That new direction emerged not only strategically but in a total rebrand for the company. You remember the ads starting in 2003, dancing silhouettes against a brightly colored backgrounds — in some cases inverted to show colored silhouettes against black backgrounds? They were the first Apple ads to feature bright colors and prominent music, and not just any music, either. Real music, made by humans: “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” by Jet and “Feel Good Inc” by Gorillaz and “Flatheads” by The Fratellis.
Remember The Fratellis?
That same year Apple opened the iTunes Store, providing a direct supply chain for the iPod customer and cutting out the brick-and-mortar record store as broker. That model, tested and refined, is what eventually became the App Store, a tiptoeing colossus that made $38.5 billion last year. Without iTunes, there would be no App Store. Similarly, without iPod, there would be no iTunes.
From iPod, to iTunes, to iPhone, to Apple Watch — millions of dollars to billions of dollars to trillions of dollars — without music, Apple wouldn’t have the lion’s share of the market it has now. Unfortunately, Tim Cook doesn’t see it that way. “Music is interesting because it inspires people,” Cook told Fast Company in February. “It motivates people. There is a deep emotional connection.” Yet Tim Cook insists on keeping Apple Music, their online streaming service that pays $0.0064 to its artists per stream, as a loss leader. “[W]e’re not in it for the money,” Cook says. That’s a troubling attitude for the CEO of, arguably, one of the biggest music companies in the world. If they’re not in it for the money, how can they expect their artists to produce?
I heard very little during last week’s presentation to suggest that Apple’s leadership recognizes the legacy left behind by Steve Jobs, an ardent music fan who saw not only the practical uses of his core product line but also the emotional connection they prized with their products. Maybe Tim Cook’s Apple Music isn’t in it for the money, but hundreds of thousands of independent artists are.
I want to remind Tim Cook, and everyone at Apple, that such a cynical perspective on music puts Apple at risk of returning to its pre-iPod days, before a “deep emotional connection” turned Apple into a trillion-dollar corporation. There was a time when Apple worked together with musicians, labels, producers, singers, songwriters, and artists of all kinds to make their lives better, not worse — and music fans stood to benefit from this collaboration.
Remember now?
