Jimmy lovine Talks Steve Jobs and Music Subscriptions

Jimmy lovine, chairman of Interscope-Geffen-A&M and co-owner of Beats, talks about trying to push Steve Jobs into music subscriptions in an interview with AllThingsD.

lovine and his team are planning to break into music subscription market and he gave the website some insight into the history behind their efforts.

In 2002, 2003, Doug asked me to go up to Apple and see Steve. So I met him and we hit it off right away. We were really close. We did some great marketing stuff together: 50 Cent, Bono, Jagger, stuff for the iPod — we did a lot of stuff together. But I was always trying to push Steve into subscription. And he wasn’t keen on it right away. [Beats co-founder] Luke Wood and I spent about three years trying to talk him into it. He was there, not there … he didn’t want to pay the record companies enough. He felt that they would come down, eventually.

I don’t know what [Apple media head] Eddy Cue would say — I’m seeing him soon — but I think in the end Steve was feeling it, but the economics …he wanted to pay the labels [for subscriptions], but [the fees were] not going to be acceptable to them.

lovine feels that to succeed with music subscriptions the service needs to be heavily curated. "Right now, somebody’s giving you 12 million songs, and you give them your credit card, and they tell you 'good luck.' You need to have some kind of help. I’m going to offer you a guide. You don’t have to use it, but it’s going to be there, and it’s going to be a trusted voice, and it’s going to be really good."

Beats' new music service is called project "Daisy". Beats recently appointed Ian Rogers as CEO. Rogers will oversee the direction, vision and strategy for project "Daisy" as well as the team developing the service.

lovine shared one other tidbit about Steve Jobs in the interview:


"Steve called me in once. He said, 'You know something, you should feel really good. You’re the only guys from software that ever built a piece of hardware successfully.' That means that we can be the guys who cracked this code as well. Because we live in both worlds. We’re actually arguably better at this than at hardware. You know why they call it hardware? It’s really hard."

Apple has been rumored to be expanding its music offerings with an iRadio service; however, recent reports have said the company is having difficulties with content agreements.

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