“Jimmy Iovine has a line he likes to use. Actually he has a lot of them. Today, Iovine runs Apple Music, the latest stop in a career that has taken him from studio rat to cofounder of Interscope Records to head of Beats Electronics. But he is also a longshoreman’s son from Red Hook, Brooklyn, and he has inherited his native borough’s brand of salty raconteurism,” Jason Tanz and Joe Pugliese report for Wired. “Over the years he’s assembled a playlist of zingers to describe, for instance, his philosophy for dealing with prima donna artists (‘If the shit gets bigger than the cat, out goes the cat’) or his appeal to Dr. Dre to build headphones with him instead of designing an athletic shoe (‘Fuck sneakers — let’s make speakers’).”
“But the line I’m talking about is the one he uses to describe his life’s ambition: ‘All I’ve ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture,'” Tanz and Pugliese report. “It sounds almost modest, the way he says it. Don’t be fooled. Some music executives want to help talented artists reach their natural audience, no matter how small. Iovine is not among them. He’s after the kind of massive flash points that unite populations around the world and change not just what they listen to but how they dress and move and behave and think and live. ‘He finds one great idea, gets rid of everything else, and chases it to the end of the earth until it’s everywhere,’ says Luke Wood, president of Beats Electronics.”
“The key, he says, is to bridge the divide that separates the worlds of art and technology. Without some understanding of engineering and the digital economy, the argument goes, musicians risk consigning themselves to irrelevance, unable to inject themselves into the ever-changing lives of their would-be listeners. And unless the tech world learns to value musical culture, our machines — and everything we do with them — will ignore and eventually suffocate a crucial part of our humanity,” Tanz and Pugliese report. “His mission to merge those disciplines has steered the past 15 years of his life. It’s why he built Beats, which he considers as much a culture company as a consumer-electronics company. It’s why he sold it to Apple, which he deems the only tech company to deeply understand mass culture, for $3 billion last year. And it’s what he hopes to accomplish with Apple Music, a gamble that he and a handpicked crew of tech-friendly tastemakers can re-create the emotional bond between musicians and listeners, convince fans to pay for music rather than stream it for free, and begin to restore music’s place atop the cultural pantheon.”
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck, guys!