Steve Jobs, Apple Computer CEO, talked to TIME’s Laura Locke about getting music execs on board, other competing music services, and why he thinks his is the coolest thing around.
Time asked, “Do you think you’ll be able to sway the tens of millions who use the unauthorized services?” Jobs’ response, “I don’t know. We’ll find out. But this is really a far better experience. Not only do the downloads not crap out half way through; and not only is it perfectly encoded ? instead of having the last four seconds cut off – but offering previews of every song in the store is just giant. Just click a button and you’re hearing a preview – it’s really cool. And it allows you to explore music in a way that no download service has ever done to date. And the ability to browse – you can’t do that with Kazaa, you can’t do any of this stuff with Kazaa, the experience is so much better than Kazaa, I think a lot of people don’t want to spend 15 minutes downloading a song and getting a less than perfect quality song when they’re all done, and, without a preview, finding out it’s the wrong song by the time they’re done.”
Time asked, “What about independent labels? Will they follow suit?” Jobs responded, “Yes. They’ve already been calling us like crazy. We’ve had to put most of them off until after launch just because the big five have most of the music, and we only had so many hours in the day. But now we’re really going to have time to focus on a lot of the independents and that will be really great.”
More questions and interesting answers here.