Jimmy Iovine, an Apple Music executive and a co-founder of Beats, has opened up about a few details regarding Apple’s new music streaming service, the impact that Taylor Swift had on it, and more in a new interview.
Iovine recently spoke with the Evening Standard, covering a wide array of details regarding Apple Music, the reaction that Apple had to artist Taylor Swift’s open letter to the company, which ultimately saw them reverse course on a controversial decision centered around artist payments during the three-month free trial for the service, competing services and more.
Iovine went into some detail regarding the conversation that he had with Apple’s Eddy Cue and even Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, regarding Swift’s open letter to Apple. Iovine notes that the decision to pay artists wasn’t instantaneous after reading Swift’s letter, as it seemed like to the rest of the internet, but it happened anyway:
“Eddy [Cue, Apple senior VP] woke up on Sunday morning,” says Iovine. “He called me and said, ‘This is a drag’. I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe there’s some stuff she doesn’t understand’. He said, ‘Why don’t you give Scott [Borchetta, Swift’s label boss] a call? I called Scott, I called Eddy back, Eddy and Tim [Cook, Apple CEO] called me back and we said, ‘Hey, you know what, we want this system to be right and we want artists to be comfortable, let’s do it’.“
As far as Apple Music goes when compared to the plethora of competing services out there goes, Iovine points out that his intention, and Apple’s intention, was to make Apple Music a bit more personable right out of the gate. The company wanted to avoid the algorithms and numbers behind-the-scenes that can make those other services feel detached by default, while Apple wanted to give their service a more human-focused attention. Iovine doesn’t outright dismiss the competition, though.
“There’s a lot of [them],” he says, disdainfully. “Music deserves elegance and the distribution right now is not great. It’s all over the place and there are a bunch of utilities. That’s the best you can find. It’s basically a really narrow, small, inelegant way to have music delivered. So it’s sterile, programmed by algorithms and numbing.”As Iovine says: “Algorithms don’t understand the subtlety and the mixing of genres. So we hired the best people we know. Hired hundreds of them.“
Recently, it’s been confirmed that Apple Music has 11 million trial members, which is a large number considering the service launched on June 30 alongside iOS 8.4, amidst a ridiculously competitive market. Of course, once monthly payments start being charged, it will be interesting to see how many of those 11 million stick around.
The full Evening Standard interview with Iovine is available through the source link below.
[via MacRumors; Evening Standard]
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