Was Steve Jobs Good for Music?

13 Comments on Was Steve Jobs Good for Music?

1. 

   Jarvis

   October 6, 2011 at 8:00 pm (13 years ago)

   Making money from music, yes he did that well……..

2. 

   Richard Ingraham

   October 6, 2011 at 8:03 pm (13 years ago)

   It certainly would be a much different place without the
   influence of Apple and all of its iToys. 
   However I would argue that Apple and specifically Steve Jobs had very
   little to do with the improvement in music production or the equipment that is
   used for music production.  Yes, many
   Macs and Mac based apps are used to record, master, produce, etc…  music. 
   However there is almost nothing that is exclusively done on a Mac that
   has not been done on a Windows based PC and many of the early innovations in
   software technology for audio recording and production happened on a PC first
   and then were ported over to or improved upon with Mac based applications.  Apple had little to nothing to do with the
   accomplishments of early pioneers like Digidesign, RML Labs, Cakewalk (used to
   be 12 Tone Systems), Sonic Foundry, SADIE, Opcode, MOTU, and many, many
   others.  Sure the platform used to run
   that software might have been an Apple product, but I doubt it would have been
   much different today without the Apple computer because that revolution was
   fueled before there even was something called a Mac from companies like
   Fairlight.  And the death knell for big
   buck recording studios really started with Alesis and the ADAT and cheap, but
   decent sounding mixers from companies like Mackie.  Computer software just sped up the process
   and made it much easier to create something actually worth listening to.

    

    

   Where Apple did make it’s influences in the music business
   is in the way people sell, buy and listen to music.  In other words it started with the Ipod and
   has moved on from there.  That is where
   the Apple mark was really made on the music industry.  How would things look different without the
   iPod, who knows.  Hard to say.  I would argue there are good and bad things
   about the way most customers low purchase and listen to music.  The main points being that it’s great that
   small name artists have access to a much greater audience now but as you
   pointed out, most of the profit margin has also disappeared and the artists
   that can demand big bucks are mostly the artists from 20 years ago that stuck
   around with a couple of new pop divas thrown in for good measure now and then.

    

    

   I am not saying that I think Steve Jobs didn’t make any contributions,
   just that I don’t really think he had much to do with the improvements we have
   seen in the past 20 years of music production, just distribution mostly and
   that is mostly because of the iToys, not the Mac.

3. 

   Dan

   October 6, 2011 at 8:22 pm (13 years ago)

   MP3 and other audio file formats were around well before Steve Jobs turned his attention to them. On a professional level, what the Mac did was to provide an elegant platform for recording and manipulating digital sound, as well as feeding into the phenomenon of the democritization of musc production. Like democracy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the final jury is still out on that one.
   But Jobs’ larger legacy was to take the ball from major record labels and show them how to monetize digitally distributed music. Rather than contribute to the financial devaluation of music as a product, which file-sharing was well on its way to doing anyway, iTunes promised a revenue structure that, albeit truncated, was still better than suing your customers. Jobs didn’t change the world — he took a changing world and grabbed it by the horns and helped redirect it. And that’s just as good a trick.
   Danwriter

4. 

   RobZantay

   October 6, 2011 at 10:10 pm (13 years ago)

   I have never owned anything made by Apple and I’ve been making electronic music longer than just about anyone on this planet. I’ve managed quite nicely, thank you, by using PC’s, the first time I started my Cakewalk program I was using a Dos system, which was a total pain in the butt, and while I will say that the icon oriented system that Jobs is given credit for, did make things a little easier to use, the fact that the entire recording industry happened to stop existing while itunes made Apple stock holders allot of cash is a fact that needs to be taken into concideration.. I was a recording artist/producer in the 1980’s and 1990’s. I don’t believe there are more than a handful of musicians who make their living in that manner today. So to imply that things are better in any way (with the exception of our ability to make world-class recordings in our bedrooms) is to lie like a dog. The advantage of being able to record like we always wanted to, right at home, has been removed by the fact that people seem to believe that music should be distributed for free. The tools I need to create that music still costs real money. Unless a musican goes onto a stage a plays for a live audience, he or she is not going to get paid. The old idea of selling records (or tapes, or CD’s) to make a living is as dead as Steve Jobs now is.

5. 

   Robert Zantay

   October 6, 2011 at 10:14 pm (13 years ago)

   What distribution? the distribution of crappy sounding MP3’s that noone that works in the music industry can stand listening to? Or maybe the ripping off of musician’s lifetime’s worth of work. Jobs made money for himself and his shareholders, end of story.

6. 

   Richard Ingraham

   October 6, 2011 at 11:58 pm (13 years ago)

   Yes, distribution of crappy sounding MP3s of in the case of iTunes MP4 or whatever those files are called.  I’m looking at it from the perspective of the end user.  He basically gave them a way to legally do something they had been doing for years which is downloading music rather than buying music on CDs or other formats.  No argument here that they helped push along a trend that was well on it’s way already… the trend toward lower quality audio rather than what the industry had been doing for decades before, which was bring out a new (usually better) sounding format to distribute music on and then reselling you the entire music catalog all over again. 

   Ummm.. guess what…  just about every company in the music business is out to make money.  You can say that Apple is unique in any way in that regard.  It’s just that who was getting to line their pockets changed, Apple rather than some CD distributors, retailers, etc…  Things change.. 

7. 

   Mark Hermann

   October 7, 2011 at 4:55 pm (13 years ago)

   Where music is concerned, Steve Jobs created amazing end user products and basically picked up the ball the music industry fumbled, creating the most successful record company out there today that wasn’t even a record company. He made carrying around music and listening to it anywhere a badge of honor, which is therefore good for music itself. And it could be argued that he allowed independent artists to sell their music online right up against the big fish and make money where they never could before in such a public space. 

   But I might argue that Derek Sivers did a better job for indie artists and was first with CD Baby. Steve basically created a singles store where you could buy the album if you wanted. (Of course, the music industry has most of that blood on their hands for selling packages of overpriced crap albums for so long that had one or two good songs so I can’t blame Steve for that.) He simply saw the opportunity.

   But while he didn’t invent it, he did basically make the mp3 file the de facto listening standard, much to the dismay of any industry professional or artist who still knows and cares how the music should really sound and knows, sadly, that most will never get to hear it or care for that matter. He also didn’t have really much to do with music creation tools, not the important ones. And if GarageBand is to be considered one of them, then I would have to say that while it’s a very cool program for the DIY artist, it could easily be argued that tools like it are part of the reason people wonder if we’re on a creative race to the bottom for making it a little too easy to make music without the skill of playing an instrument. 

   And to that studio fantasy moment, sitting there with Mozart, I can’t help but wonder that if a party ensued with girls and fun and wine and he sat marveling at all this technology and its possibilities, what would he say if the power went out? And everything fell silent. Would the party stop? Mozart could, of course, sit down at the acoustic piano, ask someone to light some candles and entertain the crowd till the wee hours. How many other “professionals” in that moment could do the same without power? Without the technology? This has always been a quandary for me where music and technology converge.

   But I don’t believe any of that falls on Steve’s lap. I think he simply made technology beautiful and easy to use. To that end, whether he made a boatload of money from it or not, he did more to celebrate music than to hurt it. 

8. 

   Anderton

   October 9, 2011 at 8:40 pm (13 years ago)

    I’d
   say the Commodore-64 is what opened the door. Sequencing, sampling,
   algorithmic composition, and more all made their debut on the C-64 (and
   to a more limited extent previously on the VIC-20, but that was more of a
   toy).
    
   The
   Mac provided a platform to which music software companies gravitated,
   but it wasn’t the only one. The Atari ST was huge in Europe, and was
   where programs like Cubase and Logic got their start. It was also the
   only computer (until Yamaha’s CX5, which was PC-based) that had MIDI
   built in. Over time, after the ST left the building, many Europeans went for the PC because of dance/remix-oriented programs like Acid, which had no equivalent on the Mac until years later.
    
   None
   of this negates the impact of the Mac, but the real credit for
   computer-based music goes to the software developers who created the
   programs – and who I think would have done so for whatever platform appeared, from
   whatever company.

9. 

   Guestified

   October 17, 2011 at 9:21 am (13 years ago)

   Hang on a moment. Windows based PCs run all the same DAW software Macs do with the exception of Logic, that Apple stole from the Windows user base (thanks for nothing Steve). World wide, there is more music being made on Windows PCs than Macs by several an orders of magnitude. It’s only once you step into an old-school US based recording studio do Macs become more prevalent. The author needs to get his head out of the US-centric market.

10. 

    Snapple

    November 4, 2011 at 4:02 am (13 years ago)

    Think Different Like Steve Jobs – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0Io9gNmQBc