Newly-acquired Apple executive Jimmy Iovine sat down with Evening Standard’s Jimi Famurewa to talk about Apple Music this week. As you’d imagine, the former record label chairman-turned-Beats-co-founder has a lot to say about Apple’s new streaming service.
Perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits from the interview have to do with Taylor Swift’s infamous open letter to Apple. Iovine says that he woke up to the letter early that Sunday morning and immediately hopped on the phone to try and get the issue sorted out.
“Eddy [Cue, Apple senior VP] woke up on Sunday morning,” says Iovine. “He called me and said, ‘This is a drag’. I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe there’s some stuff she doesn’t understand’. He said, ‘Why don’t you give Scott [Borchetta, Swift’s label boss] a call? I called Scott, I called Eddy back, Eddy and Tim [Cook, Apple CEO] called me back and we said, ‘Hey, you know what, we want this system to be right and we want artists to be comfortable, let’s do it’.”
Following those phone conversations, Cue would announce via Twitter that Apple was back-tracking on its strategy to not pay artists for streaming during its 3-month trial period. The change is believed to have cost Apple several million in customer acquisition costs.
Iovine goes on to talk about the Apple Music launch, and he attributes a lot of its early success to its human curation methods, saying: “Algorithms don’t understand the subtlety and the mixing of genres. So we hired the best people we know. Hired hundreds of them.”
The entire interview is worth reading, and you can do so here. Apple Music launched on June 30th alongside iOS 8.4, and according to comments made by SVP Eddy Cue during a recent interview with USA Today, the service already has more than 11 million subscribers.
Source: Evening Standard