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Steve Jobs on the iTunes Music Store: The Unpublished Interview

A candid talk with Apple's CEO on a landmark day in its history.

By  |  Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 1:15 am

Steve Jobs at the iTunes Music Store announcement.

Steve Jobs announces the iTunes Music Store.

On April 28th, 2003, moments before I was about to interview Steve Jobs at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, I was jittery. Anticipation? Nerves? Excitement? You bet. All of those visceral emotions were firing. Knowing Jobs’ storied reputation as an irascible and exacting Silicon Valley CEO had me on edge. But I had prepared a tight set of questions. Secretly, I was hoping he might enjoy the line of inquiry. In turn, I would have a lively and candid report for my editors at TIME.


What I didn’t know was that the interview was taking place on what would turn out to be one of the most important days in Apple’s history: The launch of the iTunes Music Store.

Once again, Steve Jobs had done the impossible. This time he had orchestrated a historic deal with recording artists and the major labels, permitting music to be legally sold and downloaded over the Internet. After spending more than tens of millions of dollars developing the back-end infrastructure–digital jukebox, store, indexing and payment system–Apple had created the first acceptable alternative to “free” unauthorized file-sharing services like Kazaa, which at the time accounted for some 200 million illegal downloads worldwide.

The landmark agreement came not a moment too soon. The mainstream music industry was desperate to stem the bleeding from lost sales. Artists wanted to be paid for their work. Consumers just wanted easy access to the world of music.

“People don’t want to steal music,” the English soul singer Seal told me at the launch event. “The whole process of downloading music is convoluted, time consuming. And people do it because there’s no viable alternative. And now there is.” 

On launch day, the iTunes Music Store had only 200,000 tracks, and the store–and the iPod–only worked with Macs. Today, Apple is the number one music retailer in the United States, and its storefronts for movies, TV shows, and apps–all descendants of the music store–are hugely successful.

Looking back, it’s almost silly to recall the intensity of skeptics back in 2003 questioning whether legal music could catch up to the pace of free and illicit Internet files. When I spoke with Jobs, even he expressed uncertainty whether consumers would convert en masse to paying via the iTunes Music Store. Sixteen billion downloaded songs later, we know the answer.

So here it is for the first time: My iTunes Music Store interview with Steve Jobs, in its entirety and verbatim.

LAURA LOCKE: “Rip. Mix. Burn.” [a tagline from Apple advertising of the time] has been Apple’s mantra as of late.  Why go legit now?

STEVE JOBS:  “Rip. Mix. Burn.” was never not legit.

When some folks thought “Rip. Mix. Burn.” was an anthem to steal music, it was just because they didn’t know what they were talking about. They obviously didn’t have any kids living at home. This was the 50 year-old-crowd that thought that.

New iPods 

We’ve been against stealing music since the beginning. We own a lot of intellectual property. Most of competitors don’t, but we do. We’re not happy when people steal. So, this is not an about face for us, or anything like that. We’ve been consistent from the beginning. “Rip. Mix. Burn.” never meant go steal music—it meant rip, mix, burn—exactly what it said.

Any regrets or remorse about how the tagline “Rip. Mix. Burn.” may have been misinterpreted?

No, not really, it certainly got people thinking about Apple and music I guess. It was frustrating at times when people didn’t know what it meant, but everyone under 30 knew what it meant, so that was probably what really counted.

How do you think Apple’s new music service will change the digital music landscape?

With the introduction of the new iTunes Music Store we’ve now built the first real complete ecosystem for the digital music age.

We’ve got a way to buy music online legally that’s fantastic—it’s better than any other way to acquire music. We’ve got a way to manage music with the iTunes Jukebox, which is the best in the world. And we’ve got a way to listen to music on the go with the iPod—which is the most popular MP3 player in the world—and the coolest, one of the coolest things in the world. So we’ve really got, from one end to another, a complete solution for digital music. We’re the only people in the world to do this, so we feel great about it.

Do you think you’ll be able to sway the tens of millions who use the unauthorized services?

Good Karma 

Well, I don’t know. We’ll find out. But this is really a far better experience. Not only do the downloads not crap out half way through, and not only is it perfectly encoded—instead of having the last four seconds cut off—but offering previews of every song in the store is just giant, it’s giant. Just click a button and you’re hearing a preview. It’s really cool. And it allows you to explore music in a way that no download service has ever done to date. And the ability to browse—you can’t do that with Kazaa, you can’t do any of this stuff with Kazaa, the experience is so much better than Kazaa, I think a lot of people don’t want to spend 15 minutes downloading a song and getting a less than perfect quality song when they’re all done, and without a preview, finding out it’s the wrong song by the time they’re done.

What about subscription services?

 

Well, they’ve failed. They’ve completely failed. Nobody wants to rent their music. They have hardly any subscribers.

Any projected usage stats on iTunes Music Store you can share?

You know, we have some internally. But who knows? We have no idea. I’m waiting for some data today, actually. We were swamped earlier, so I heard.

Some detractors like those at Listen.com say that downloading isn’t the most popular feature on their music service Rhapsody. What’s your response? 

Well, that’s correct. Downloading sucks on their service. You download a track and you can’t burn it to a CD without paying them more money—you can’t put it on your MP3 player, you can’t put it on multiple computers—it sucks!  So of course nobody downloads! You pay extra to download even on top of subscription fees. No wonder they have hardly any download traffic—[they] hardly even have any subscribers.

The Wall Street Journal recently fashioned you as a “digital music impresario,” how do you feel about that?

I didn’t know what it meant. Does that mean I run a carnival? What we do at Apple is very simple: we invent stuff. We make the best personal computers in the world, some of the best software, the best portable MP3/music player, and now we make the best online music store in the world. We just make stuff. So I don’t know what impresario means. We make stuff, put it out there, and people use it.

Clearly, we’ve been leading the revolution. The personal computer is changing—it’s changing into this digital hub for a digital lifestyle—so we’ve been leading that change, we’re not followers, we’ve lead that charge. Digital moviemaking, DVD burning, digital photography, and of course, digital music. So we are in the forefront.

What’s next?

 

I think what’s next for me is getting a good night’s sleep… I don’t know… We have all sorts [of things] that we work on, but we never really talk about what’s next until we’re ready…

Can you say anything about the Music Store’s development costs or Apple’s investment?

Well, we don’t usually talk about that, but all I would say is that… you know I had somebody comment today, “Well, now that you have introduced your store, do you expect a lot others?” And I guess our answer is no. This is really hard. Just to create an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world, you know, we’ve done that over the last several years with movie trailers and stuff, and that’s tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms – it’s huge – and we’ve already got that in place, and say you want to have millions of transactions, and our online store is all tied into SAP and auditors bless it, and to do that, that’s tens of millions of dollars, and we have one-click shopping, and only us and Amazon have that, and then to make a jukebox, if you don’t a popular jukebox, how much does it cost to make iTunes and make it popular? A lot! But we’ve got that.

And then iPod, if you want to make an iPod, what does that cost? Well, nobody has done it but us, people have tried, but they haven’t even come close. That’s a lot of money. So we’ve already made these investments and we can leverage all these investments. And then we’ve invested more on top of that to make a store. But to recreate this, it’s tens of millions of dollars and years. That’s why I don’t think this is going to be so easy to copy.

How tough was it to sell your music service concept to music industry executives?

Steve Jobs watches Eminem 

Well, we started almost a year and a half ago, and as you recall, the climate at that time was more hostile than it is today, but we did have the luxury of going in at the top, so I talked to Roger Aims at Warner, Doug Morris at Universal, and the other guys. And they clearly realized that the Internet was in their future, but they were shell-shocked with Napster and people stealing their content. And so, the major discussions with the labels were really over giving the users broad personal use rights. And we worked through that, and they learned. I think they trusted us to do the right thing. You know most everybody in the music industry uses a Mac—and they all have iPods—even the ones who don’t use a computer have somebody else load up their iPods for ‘em with the songs they want.

So I think they see Apple as the most creative of the technical companies, a very artist-friendly company, very credible. And you know, we were able to negotiate landmark deals with them that no one else has ever come close to in terms of offering the user really broad rights to the music they buy.

What about independent labels, will they follow suit?

Yes. They’ve already been calling us like crazy. We’ve had to put most of them off until after launch just because the major big five have most of the music, and we only had so many hours in the day. But now we’re really going to have time to focus on a lot of the independents and that will be really great.

Apple Music 

With iTunes Music Store, the artists win, music labels win, but what about traditional retailers?

You should go ask them. The Internet was made to deliver music.

Anything else you would like to add? 

It’s so great! I cannot overemphasize that because of the previews, browsing, etc. you fall in love with music again—and you find the hits you’ve heard before and the gems you’ve never heard before—and it’s really wonderful.  It’s so cool.

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  推荐序言 深度学习/机器学习,爆发于2015年 算法能力+工程能力 1992年,施乐创建了应用协同过滤算法的推荐系统 本书for:推荐、广告、搜索领域的从业者/爱好者 第1章 互联网的增长引擎──推荐系统 不同业务模式的公司定义的具体推荐系统优化目标不同,例如,视频类公司更注重用户观看时长,电商类公司更注重用户的购买转化率(Conversion Rate,CVR ) YouTube推荐系统的主要优化目标就是观看时长,而不是CTR 工程论文:Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommenders 大致流程:构建深度学习模型,预测用户观看某候选视频的时长,按照预测时长进行候选视频的排序,形成最终的推荐列表 淘宝首页:千人千面(即使是1%的CTR提高,也会到来数十亿元收入增加) 推荐系统逻辑框架:f(U,I,C), User, Item, Context 推荐系统数据部分:实时数据、准实时数据、离线数据 推荐系统模型部分:召回层、排序层、补充策略与算法层(排序层是工业界与学术界研究的核心) 第2章 前深度学习时代──推荐系统的进化之路 UserCF: 基于用户相似度进行推荐的协同过滤算法 互联网用户数的增长会导致矩阵维护复杂度急剧上升 用户的历史数据可能稀疏(导致UserCF不适用于酒店预订、大件商品购买等低频应用) 适用于发现热点、以及跟踪热点的趋势 ItemCF:基于物品相似度进行推荐的协同过滤算法 更适用于兴趣变化较为稳定的应用 协同过滤的天然缺陷:推荐结果的头部效应较明显 其它模型:矩阵分解、逻辑回归、FM、FFM、GBDT+LR、LS-PLM (细节已经要看不懂了) 第3章 浪潮之巅──深度学习在推荐系统中的应用 Google Play的推荐团队,基于对业务场景的深刻理解,提出了Wide&Deep模型 这张属于看不懂那种类型 第4章 Embedding技术在推荐系统中的应用 Not Interested 第5章 多角度审视推荐系统 从7个不同的角度切入推荐系统 推荐系统如何选取和处理特征 召回层的主要策略有哪些? 实时性的重要性体现在哪里?有哪些提高实时性的方法? 如何根据具体场景构建推荐模型的优化目标 如何基于用户动机改进模型结构 冷启动问题的解决方法有哪些 什么是探索与利用问题?有哪些主流的解决方法 第...

360T7 刷机步骤及固件

https://cmi.hanwckf.top/p/360t7-firmware/   360T7的固件支持由immortalwrt-mt798x项目提供支持,请参考: https://cmi.hanwckf.top/p/immortalwrt-mt798x https://github.com/hanwckf/immortalwrt-mt798x 刷机步骤 参考 此处 的办法开启原厂固件的UART和telnet功能 在以下链接下载360T7测试固件(纯净版,无任何插件) https://wwd.lanzout.com/b0bt9idwd 密码:ezex (此固件已过时,请选择其它更新的固件) 接下来将刷入修改版uboot。修改版uboot的优点有: 固件分区可达108MB,原厂uboot只能使用36M 自带一个简单的webui恢复页面 到以下仓库的Release页面下载uboot,目前暂时仅支持360T7,后续将支持更多mt798x路由器。 推荐使用 mt7981_360t7-fip-fixed-parts.bin , fixed-parts 代表uboot分区表在编译期间固定,不会随着uboot环境变量变化。 https://github.com/hanwckf/bl-mt798x/releases/latest 将 mt7981_360t7-fip-fixed-parts.bin 通过HFS等方式上传到路由器,使用以下命令刷入uboot mtd write mt7981_360t7-fip-fixed-parts.bin fip 确认刷入完毕后,拔掉路由器电源。然后将电脑的IP地址设置为固定的 192.168.1.2 ,接着按住路由器的RESET按钮后通电开机,等待8s后用浏览器进入 192.168.1.1 在uboot恢复页面选择要刷入的固件。immortalwrt-mt798x目前编译两个版本的360T7固件。 建议修改版uboot直接使用 immortalwrt-mediatek-mt7981-mt7981-360-t7-108M-squashfs-factory.bin ,两种固件区别如下: mt7981-360-t7-108M 为108M固件分区,原厂uboot不可启动,需要修改版u...