He had to wean them away from $18 CD sales and get them willing to sell single tracks on demand for 99 cents. Speaking against the cataclysmic changes that Napster brought to the CD business, he said, "The user wins, because he gets a better service and doesn't have to be a thief."īut to get this win for the consumer, Jobs had to break the music industry's business model.
Jobs appealed to people's ethical desire not to steal. 'We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be, there's just no legal alternative.'"Īs with other great entrepreneurs, Jobs set out to create a win-win-win-win situation: One that would benefit the artists who composed and performed music, the record labels who cut CDs, the company (Apple) that sold the iPods, and consumers - who could finally listen to all of their music in one place.
Mitchell on demand 2015 filesharing download#
As a service, it effectively enabled the sharing of digital music files, enabling a user to download a free copy of a song purchased by someone else.Įnter Steve Jobs, who was more of a counter-cultural rock-and-roll rebel than your stereotypical slide-rule-toting computer geek.Īccording to the biography written by Walter Isaascon, published days after Jobs' death from cancer, "He knew that the best way to stop piracy - in fact the only way - was to offer an alternative that was more attractive than the brain-dead services that music companies were concocting. Napster was shut down for contributing to copyright infringement. As a company, Napster created an online catalog that allowed computer users to share, on a peer-to-peer basis, digital MP3 music files. Napster had been the brainchild of a college student who wanted to share what he was listening to with his fellow students. This was the Napster era of rampant file-sharing. That invited consumers - particularly young people with a strong emotional connection to their music - to load up shiny iPods with hundreds or thousands of digital songs. This was a digital audio player with so much more storage capacity than its competitors. Originally a computer maker, Apple became a post-personal computer company with the launch of the iPod in 2001. It’s a far cry from the vision of the late Steve Jobs, the founder and legendary leader of Apple until his death in 2011. When a company as big and successful as Apple changes its mind about something as significant as the music industry, it's worth taking note of what’s changing with consumers.Īpple, the world’s most valuable company, is betting that consumers want to spend more money through Apple Music, the $9.99/month music streaming service it launched on Tuesday.
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