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\nJustin Sullivan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

How Steve Jobs rescued old media<\/strong>
\nMusic was free online, until Jobs showed that people still wanted to pay
\nby Jaime Weinman on Friday, October 14, 2011 7:40am <\/p>\n

It seems strange to think of Steve Jobs as the man who saved traditional media. After all, everywhere you look, his products are wreaking havoc on old media formats: people are watching TV shows on their iPads instead of staying home to watch them live; people are reading e-books instead of lugging around paper; bookstores and record stores replace much of their shelf space with iPhone and iPod sections. But never mind the shakeups that are occurring in businesses like music: if it hadn\u2019t been for Jobs and iTunes, there might not be a music business to shake up. Jobs\u2019s fellow corporate tycoon, Viacom\u2019s Sumner Redstone, put it very simply in a 2007 speech at Boston University: iTunes \u201cresurrected the music industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Think back to 2000, before the iPod and iTunes existed. Napster had cut deeply into music sales, and while the service itself was shut down, there was no shutting down the concept of music piracy. The \u201980s and \u201990s compact disc boom, when people ran out to buy physical albums in little plastic jewel cases, was over, and music companies couldn\u2019t accept that: Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in technology issues, told Maclean\u2019s that \u201cthey sought to sue the MP3 player out of existence. Any sort of innovation that left someone other than the industry with control was something to be feared and stopped.\u201d But no lawsuit could change the fact that people wanted music that they didn\u2019t have to stuff into suitcases and carry from place to place, and they wanted it for free.<\/p>\n

Computer Weekly proclaimed in 2000 that \u201cthe battle against piracy may be lost completely,\u201d and that \u201cmass copyright infringement over the Internet\u201d would be the future. The music companies countered by trying to create their own music services, which bombed because, as Geist puts it, \u201cThey were label-specific, they only played on a limited number of MP3s. It was just so consumer-unfriendly.\u201d Jobs realized that no one was going to sign up and pay for only the music that Sony or Universal was willing to give them. \u201cPeople don\u2019t want to buy music as a subscription,\u201d he told Rolling Stone in 2003. \u201cThey want to own their music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jobs\u2019s alternative was the iTunes store, which many music corporations were initially reluctant to go along with. (\u201cAt first, they kicked us out,\u201d Jobs recalled, \u201cbut we kept going back again and again.\u201d) It was a counterintuitive idea in the post-Napster era: it was based on the notion that people still wanted to pay for music, even though they could get it for free on some other part of the internet. Talking with Jobs the day the store was launched, CNN interviewer Miles O\u2019Brien was incredulous that anyone could try to put that genie back in the bottle: \u201cWhat makes you so certain,\u201d O\u2019Brien said, \u201cthat people are going to actually pay for music they see online?\u201d<\/p>\n

But Jobs had a plan, and that plan revolved around the number 99. \u201cYou can just buy music at 99 cents a song,\u201d he enthused to O\u2019Brien in explaining why people would go for his legal service. With the price of many individual tracks kept below $1\u2014a price point that hardly seems like a major investment, no matter how many you wind up buying overall\u2014Jobs realized that purchasing a song would seem like a much more casual decision than buying a CD. In exchange for the 99 cents, or $1.29 for more expensive songs, customers would get a lot of things they couldn\u2019t get from pirate sites. With iTunes, you were free from the guilt of breaking the law. And you could be pretty sure the hit you downloaded would be the actual song, and not some bootlegger holding a recording device up to the radio.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly, it was more convenient and faster to go to iTunes than to search everywhere for a pirated version; as Jobs put it, illegal downloaders were \u201cspending an hour to download four songs that you could buy for under $4 from Apple, which means you\u2019re working for under minimum wage.\u201d Jobs realized that people will pay extra money if it saves time and trouble.<\/p>\n

But iTunes didn\u2019t just revive the idea of paying for content; it helped expand the amount of content people were able to pay for. In the CD era, a lot of obscure music didn\u2019t make it into the format, and if it was released, most stores didn\u2019t stock it. In the era of online-only music, free from the necessity to package and distribute a physical copy, companies were able to release all sorts of uncommercial music. At the height of the CD era, reissues of old Broadway cast albums stalled out, a victim of poor sales; now Masterworksbroadway.com offers every flop musical via downloads.<\/p>\n

iTunes has even changed the things we see and hear on other platforms. The U.S. version of The Office was headed for cancellation in its first season until the network noticed that it was becoming phenomenally popular on iTunes. Not only did NBC make money on those episodes instead of just letting them get pirated, iTunes showed it just how much potential there was in the franchise, and allowed the show to stay on TV, building an audience and eventually making a fortune. iTunes was a medium where consumers could vote directly, with cash, on what television and music should be allowed to continue, cutting through the middleman of TV and radio advertising; Jobs, Geist says, \u201cput consumers at the front of the line rather than at the back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, while Jobs helped save music sales and music profits, he also left them a little different than before he came along. The 99-cent song has \u201cshifted us from a CD world to a singles world,\u201d Geist says, and the labels still haven\u2019t come to terms with the fact that we can buy only the song we want: \u201cSo much of their so-called decline in revenue can be attributed to a change from a model where you were selling 12 songs to a model where you were selling one.\u201d But even that is a return to an older model, a very old model\u2014thanks to Steve Jobs, the single is king, just like it was before albums took over the music world. As streaming services like Spotify threaten to overturn the music ownership model that Jobs fought to preserve, he may turn out to be the last defender of old-fashioned music distribution. Whatever happens, he\u2019ll be known as the man whose company, as he put it, \u201cbrought music back into people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

How Steve Jobs rescued old media<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n