213 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
213 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2013-06-14T11:36:57.000Z'
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title: The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
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url: http://sivers.org/itunes
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author: beshrkayali
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points: 420
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 105
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1371209817
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_beshrkayali
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- story_5879322
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objectID: '5879322'
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year: 2010
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---
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[Anything You Want](/a) ”:
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# The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote
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2010-11-11
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In May 2003, Apple invited me to their headquarters to discuss getting
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CD Baby’s catalog into the iTunes Music Store.
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iTunes had just launched two weeks before, with only some music from the
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major labels. Many of us in the music biz were not sure this idea was
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going to work. Especially those who had seen companies like
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[eMusic](http://www.emusic.com/) do this exact same model for years
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without big success.
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I flew to Cupertino thinking I’d be meeting with one of their marketing
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or tech people. When I arrived, I found out that about a hundred people
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from small record labels and distributors had also been invited.
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We all went into a little presentation room, not knowing what to expect.
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Then out comes Steve Jobs. Whoa\! Rock star.
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He was in full persuasive presentation mode. Trying to convince all of
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us to give Apple our entire catalog of music. Talking about iTunes
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success so far, and all the reasons we should work with Apple.
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He made a point of saying, “**We want the iTunes Music Store to have
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every piece of music ever recorded.** Even if it’s discontinued or not
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selling much, we want it all.”
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This was **huge**, because until 2003, independent musicians were always
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denied access to the big outlets. For Apple to sell all music, not just
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music from artists who had signed their rights away to a corporation,
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this was amazing\!
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Then they showed us the software we’d all have to use to send them each
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album. The software required us to put the audio CD into a Mac CD-Rom
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drive, type in all of the album info, song titles and bio, then click
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\[encode\] for it to rip, and \[upload\] when done.
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I raised my hand and asked if it was required that we use their
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software. They said yes.
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I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as
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lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist
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themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact
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specifications.
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The Apple guys said, “Sorry, you need to use this software; there is no
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other way.”
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Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf
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again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that
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Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.
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**They said they’d be ready for us to start uploading in the next couple
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weeks.**
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I flew home that night, posted my meeting notes on my website, emailed
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all of my clients to announce the news, and went to sleep.
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When I woke, I had furious emails and voicemails from my contact at
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Apple.
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“What the hell are you doing? That meeting was confidential\! Take those
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notes off your site immediately\! Our legal department is furious\!”
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There was no mention of confidentiality at the meeting and no agreement
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to sign. But I removed my notes from my site immediately, to be nice.
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(You can still see a copy someone posted
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[here](http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66729&cid=6133882).)
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All was well, or so I thought.
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**Apple emailed us the iTunes Music Store contract. We immediately
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signed it and returned it the same day.**
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I started building the system to deliver everyone’s music to iTunes.
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I decided we’d have to charge $40 for this service, to cover our
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bandwidth and payroll costs of pulling each CD out of the warehouse,
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entering all the info, digitizing, uploading, and putting it back in the
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warehouse.
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**5000 musicians signed up in advance, each paying $40.** That $200,000
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helped pay for the extra equipment and people needed to make this
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happen.
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Within two weeks, we got contacted by Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, Napster,
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eMusic, and more — each saying they wanted our entire catalog.
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Yes\! Awesome\!
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Maybe you can’t appreciate this now, but the summer of 2003 was the
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biggest turning point that independent music has ever had. Until that
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point, almost no big business would sell independent music.
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By iTunes saying they wanted everything, then their competitors needing
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to keep up, we were in\! Since the summer of 2003, all musicians
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everywhere can sell all their music in almost every outlet online. Do
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you realize how amazing that is?
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But there was one problem.
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iTunes wasn’t getting back to us.
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Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and the rest were all up and running. **But
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iTunes wasn’t returning our signed contract.**
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Was it because I posted my meeting notes?
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Had I pissed-off Steve Jobs?
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Nobody at Apple would say anything. **It had been months.** My musicians
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were getting impatient and angry.
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I gave optimistic apologies, but I was starting to get worried, too.
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A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote
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speech about iTunes.
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People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the
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competition. They had 400,000 songs while Rhapsody and Napster had over
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2 million songs. (Over 500,000 of those were from CD Baby.)
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**Four minutes in, he said something that made my pounding heart sink to
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my burning stomach:**
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“This number could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in
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every song. But we realize that record companies do a great service.
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They edit\! Did you know that if you and I record a song, for $40 we can
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pay a few of the services to get it on their site, through some
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intermediaries? We can be on Rhapsody and all these other guys for $40?
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Well **we don’t want to let that stuff on our site\!** So we’ve had to
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edit it. And these are 400,000 quality songs.”
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([Watch the video,
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here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ3SbxTu7Zs#t=3m45s).)
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Whoa\! Wow. **Steve Jobs just dissed me hard\!**
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I’m the only one charging $40. That was me he’s referring to\!
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Shit. OK. That’s that. Steve changed his mind. No independents on
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iTunes. You heard the man.
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I hated the position this put me in.
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Ever since I started my company in 1998, I had been offering an
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excellent service. I could make promises and keep them, because I was in
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full control.
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Now, for the first time, **I had promised something that was out of my
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control.**
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So it was time to do the right thing, no matter how much it hurt.
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I decided to **refund everybody’s $40**, with my deepest apologies. With
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5000 musicians signed up, that meant I was refunding **$200,000.**
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Since we couldn’t promise anything, I couldn’t charge money in good
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conscience.
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- I removed all mention of iTunes from my site.
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- I removed the $40 cost.
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- I changed the language to say we can’t promise anything.
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- I emailed everyone to let them know what had happened.
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I decided to make it a free service from that point on.
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**The very next day, we got our signed contract back from Apple, along
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with upload instructions.**
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Unbelievable.
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We asked, “Why now?”, but got no answer.
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Whatever. Fucking Apple.
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We started encoding and uploading immediately.
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I quietly added iTunes back to the list of companies on our site.
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But I never again promised a customer that I could do something beyond
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my full control.
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[](/a "Anything You Want — by Derek Sivers")
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