Steve_Jobs_The_Exclusive_Biography

cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

That July, Sony appointed a veteran of the music industry, Jay Samit, to create its own iTunes-like service, called Sony Connect, which would sell songs online and allow them to play on Sony’s portable music devices. “The move was immediately understood as a way to unite the sometimes conflicting electronics and content divisions,” the New York Times reported. “That internal battle was seen by many as the reason Sony, the inventor of the Walkman and the biggest player in the portable audio market, was being trounced by Apple.” Sony Connect launched in May 2004. It lasted just over three years before Sony shut it down.

Microsoft was willing to license its Windows Media software and digital rights format to other companies, just as it had licensed out its operating system in the 1980s. Jobs, on the other hand, would not license out Apple’s FairPlay to other device makers; it worked only on an iPod. Nor would he allow other online stores to sell songs for use on iPods. A variety of experts said this would eventually cause Apple to lose market share, as it did in the computer wars of the 1980s. “If Apple continues to rely on a proprietary architecture,” the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen told Wired, “the iPod will likely become a niche product.” (Other than in this case, Christensen was one of the world’s most insightful business analysts, and Jobs was deeply influenced by his book

The Innovator’s Dilemma.) Bill Gates made the same argument. “There’s nothing unique about music,” he said. “This story has played out on the PC.”

Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, tried to

circumvent Apple’s restrictions in July 2004 with a service called Harmony. He had attempted to convince Jobs to license Apple’s FairPlay format to Harmony, but when that didn’t happen, Glaser just reverseengineered it and used it with the songs that Harmony sold. Glaser’s strategy was that the songs sold by Harmony would play on any device, including an iPod or a Zune or a Rio, and he launched a marketing campaign with the slogan “Freedom of Choice.” Jobs was furious and issued a release saying that Apple was “stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod.” RealNetworks responded by launching an Internet petition that demanded “Hey Apple! Don’t break my iPod.” Jobs kept quiet for a few months, but in October he released a new version of the iPod software that caused songs bought through Harmony to become inoperable. “Steve is a one-of-a-kind guy,” Glaser said. “You know that about him when you do business with him.”

In the meantime Jobs and his team—Rubinstein, Fadell, Robbin, Ive—were able to keep coming up with new versions of the iPod that extended Apple’s lead.

The first major revision, announced in January 2004, was the iPod Mini. Far smaller than the original iPod— just the size of a business card—it had less capacity and was about the same price. At one point Jobs decided to kill it, not seeing why anyone would want to pay the same for less. “He doesn’t do sports, so he didn’t relate to how it would be great on a run or in the gym,” said Fadell. In fact the Mini was what truly launched the iPod to market dominance, by eliminating the competition from smaller flash-drive players. In the eighteen months after it was introduced, Apple’s market share in the portable music player market shot from 31% to 74%.

The iPod Shuffle, introduced in January 2005, was even more revolutionary. Jobs learned that the shuffle feature on the iPod, which played songs in random order, had become very popular. People liked to be surprised, and they were also too lazy to keep setting up and revising their playlists. Some users even became obsessed with figuring out whether the song selection was truly random, and if so, why their iPod kept coming back to, say, the Neville Brothers. That feature led to the iPod Shuffle. As Rubinstein and Fadell were working on creating a flash player that was small and inexpensive, they kept doing things like making the screen tinier. At one point Jobs came in with a crazy suggestion: Get rid of the screen altogether. “What?!?” Fadell responded. “Just get rid of it,” Jobs insisted. Fadell asked how users would navigate the songs. Jobs’s insight was that you wouldn’t need to navigate; the songs would play randomly. After all, they were songs you had chosen. All that was needed was a button to skip over a song if you weren’t in the mood for it. “Embrace uncertainty,” the ads read.

As competitors stumbled and Apple continued to innovate, music became a larger part of Apple’s business. In January 2007 iPod sales were half of Apple’s revenues. The device also added luster to the Apple brand. But an even bigger success was the iTunes Store. Having sold one million songs in the first six days after it was introduced in April 2003, the store went on to sell seventy million songs in its first year. In February 2006 the store sold its one billionth song when Alex Ostrovsky, sixteen, of West Bloomfield, Michigan, bought Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” and got a congratulatory call from Jobs, bestowing upon him ten iPods, an iMac, and a $10,000 music gift certificate.

The success of the iTunes Store also had a more subtle benefit. By 2011 an important new business had

emerged: being the service that people trusted with their online identity and payment information. Along with Amazon, Visa, PayPal, American Express, and a few other services, Apple had built up databases of people who trusted them with their email address and credit card information to facilitate safe and easy shopping. This allowed Apple to sell, for example, a magazine subscription through its online store; when that happened, Apple, not the magazine publisher, would have a direct relationship with the subscriber. As the iTunes Store sold videos, apps, and subscriptions, it built up a database of 225 million active users by June 2011, which positioned Apple for the next age of digital commerce.

MUSIC MAN

The Sound Track of His Life

Jimmy Iovine, Bono, Jobs, and The Edge, 2004

On His iPod

As the iPod phenomenon grew, it spawned a question that was asked of presidential candidates, B- list celebrities, first dates, the queen of England, and just about anyone else with white earbuds: “What’s on your iPod?” The parlor game took off when Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a piece in the New York Times in early 2005 dissecting the answer that President George W. Bush gave when she asked him that question. “Bush’s iPod is heavy on traditional country singers,” she reported. “He has selections by Van Morrison, whose ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably ‘Centerfield.’” She got a Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, to analyze the selection, and he commented, “One thing that’s interesting is that the president likes artists who don’t like him.”

“Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book,” Steven Levy wrote in The Perfect Thing. “All somebody needs to do is scroll through your library on that click wheel, and, musically speaking, you’re naked. It’s not just what you like—it’s who you are.” So one day, when we were sitting in his living room listening to music, I asked Jobs to let me see his. As we sat there, he flicked through his favorite songs.

Not surprisingly, there were all six volumes of

Dylan’s bootleg series, including the tracks Jobs had first started worshipping when he and Wozniak were able to score them on reel-to-reel tapes years before the series was officially released. In addition, there were fifteen other Dylan albums, starting with his first, Bob Dylan (1962), but going only up to Oh Mercy (1989). Jobs had spent a lot of time arguing with Andy Hertzfeld and others that Dylan’s subsequent albums, indeed any of his albums after Blood on the Tracks (1975), were not as powerful as his early performances. The one exception he made was Dylan’s track “Things Have Changed” from the 2000 movie Wonder Boys. Notably his iPod did not include Empire Burlesque (1985), the album that Hertzfeld had brought him the weekend he was ousted from Apple.

The other great trove on his iPod was the Beatles. He included songs from seven of their albums: A Hard Day’s Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, Meet the Beatles! and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The solo albums missed the cut. The Rolling Stones clocked in next, with six albums:

Emotional Rescue, Flashpoint, Jump Back, Some Girls, Sticky Fingers, and Tattoo You. In the case of the Dylan and the Beatles albums, most were included in their entirety. But true to his belief that albums can and should be disaggregated, those of the Stones and most other artists on his iPod included only three or four cuts. His onetime girlfriend Joan Baez was amply represented by selections from four albums, including two different versions of “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word.”

His iPod selections were those of a kid from the seventies with his heart in the sixties. There were Aretha, B. B. King, Buddy Holly, Buffalo Springfield, Don McLean, Donovan, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, John

Mellencamp, Simon and Garfunkel, and even The Monkees (“I’m a Believer”) and Sam the Sham (“Wooly Bully”). Only about a quarter of the songs were from more contemporary artists, such as 10,000 Maniacs, Alicia Keys, Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Dido, Green Day, John Mayer (a friend of both his and Apple), Moby (likewise), U2, Seal, and Talking Heads. As for classical music, there were a few recordings of Bach, including the Brandenburg Concertos, and three albums by YoYo Ma.

Jobs told Sheryl Crow in May 2003 that he was downloading some Eminem tracks, admitting, “He’s starting to grow on me.” James Vincent subsequently took him to an Eminem concert. Even so, the rapper missed making it onto Jobs’s iPod. As Jobs said to Vincent after the concert, “I don’t know . . .” He later told me, “I respect Eminem as an artist, but I just don’t want to listen to his music, and I can’t relate to his values the way I can to Dylan’s.”

His favorites did not change over the years. When the iPad 2 came out in March 2011, he transferred his favorite music to it. One afternoon we sat in his living room as he scrolled through the songs on his new iPad and, with a mellow nostalgia, tapped on ones he wanted to hear.

We went through the usual Dylan and Beatles favorites, then he became more reflective and tapped on a Gregorian chant, “Spiritus Domini,” performed by Benedictine monks. For a minute or so he zoned out, almost in a trance. “That’s really beautiful,” he murmured. He followed with Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto and a fugue from The WellTempered Clavier. Bach, he declared, was his favorite classical composer. He was particularly fond of listening to the contrasts between the two versions of the “Goldberg Variations” that Glenn Gould recorded,

the first in 1955 as a twenty-two-year-old little-known pianist and the second in 1981, a year before he died. “They’re like night and day,” Jobs said after playing them sequentially one afternoon. “The first is an exuberant, young, brilliant piece, played so fast it’s a revelation. The later one is so much more spare and stark. You sense a very deep soul who’s been through a lot in life. It’s deeper and wiser.” Jobs was on his third medical leave that afternoon when he played both versions, and I asked which he liked better. “Gould liked the later version much better,” he said. “I used to like the earlier, exuberant one. But now I can see where he was coming from.”

He then jumped from the sublime to the sixties: Donovan’s “Catch the Wind.” When he noticed me look askance, he protested, “Donovan did some really good stuff, really.” He punched up “Mellow Yellow,” and then admitted that perhaps it was not the best example. “It sounded better when we were young.”

I asked what music from our childhood actually held up well these days. He scrolled down the list on his iPad and called up the Grateful Dead’s 1969 song “Uncle John’s Band.” He nodded along with the lyrics:

“When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door.” For a moment we were back at that tumultuous time when the mellowness of the sixties was ending in discord. “Whoa, oh, what I want to know is, are you kind?”

Then he turned to Joni Mitchell. “She had a kid she put up for adoption,” he said. “This song is about her little girl.” He tapped on “Little Green,” and we listened to the mournful melody and lyrics that describe the feelings of a mother who gives up a child. “So you sign all the papers in the family name / You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed.” I asked whether he still often thought about being put up for adoption.

“No, not much,” he said. “Not too often.”

These days, he said, he thought more about getting older than about his birth. That led him to play Joni Mitchell’s greatest song, “Both Sides Now,” with its lyrics about being older and wiser: “I’ve looked at life from both sides now, / From win and lose, and still somehow, / It’s life’s illusions I recall, / I really don’t know life at all.” As Glenn Gould had done with Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” Mitchell had recorded “Both Sides Now” many years apart, first in 1969 and then in an excruciatingly haunting slow version in 2000. He played the latter. “It’s interesting how people age,” he noted.

Some people, he added, don’t age well even when they are young. I asked who he had in mind. “John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, and I’m just afraid he’s blowing it big time,” Jobs replied. Jobs liked Mayer and occasionally had him over for dinner in Palo Alto. When he was twenty-seven, Mayer appeared at the January 2004 Macworld, where Jobs introduced GarageBand, and he became a fixture at the event most years. Jobs punched up Mayer’s hit “Gravity.” The lyrics are about a guy filled with love who inexplicably dreams of ways to throw it away: “Gravity is working against me, / And gravity wants to bring me down.” Jobs shook his head and commented, “I think he’s a really good kid underneath, but he’s just been out of control.”

At the end of the listening session, I asked him a well-worn question: the Beatles or the Stones? “If the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set of master tapes, I would grab the Beatles,” he answered. “The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles.” As he was ruminating about how fortunate we were to have all of