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Steve Jobs and Music
Written by Jimmy
Have been reeading Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs, which I would highly recommend, simply because of its subject matter (you read my blog on square roots that came from the book). Jobs comes across as a pretty tough human being an extraordinary revolutionary; in one lifetime, and a short one at that, he redefined computer, music, digital pubslishing, movie-making, phones, … I have a hard time getting to the gym and feeding the dogs in the same day.
There are extaordainry story of his drive to create the extradonary apple brand, probabably best explained through the voice over of the Think Different Campaign:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in teh square holes. The ones how see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And thave no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorfiy or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is to ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as teh crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
This is a corporate brand positioning! It is why Bono said the Apple brand was the only corporate brand’s who’s ass he would kiss! The book also describes the passion of Jobs and Apple for simplicity of design; I think the Ives quotee (his chieif designer when he came back to Apple the second time):
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the produc defer to you. Simplicity …involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simply, you have to go really deep. … You have to deeply understand the essence of the product in order to get rid of the parts taht are not essential.'[pg 343]
The book goes on to describe the extraordinary lengths they went to do to simply everything about the iPod, the iPad, etc.. You weren’t allowed to be more than 3 clicks from your favourite song, you should never create playlists on the iPod (use the computer for that) because the device would die in the complexity of commands that requires… the shuffle should be only that … not screen to show songs… just enjoy the shuffle experience….
Then he reveals himself. He earlier described why Pixar was so great – he said the as CEO he could bridge the gap between technology and art. Later, he describes why the iPod (Apple) beat the Zune (Microsoft’s poor attempt to go to MP3 players):
The older I get , the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much. [p 407]
So, Steve Job’s views on music seems whole relevant, which is why Isaacson goes on in the next chapter to talk about this. So here’s roughly Jobs’s top 5 musicians. For a child of the 60’s, no real surprises:
5. Bach, Goldberg Variations.
4. Benecdictin Monks, Spiritus Domini. Appealed to his ‘inner Zen.’
3. Joni Mitchel, Little Green: He loved Joni and loved this song, which reminded him of his own Abandonment.
2. The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever: He was fascinated by how each version of the song, from demo-to-final, built into something better and better. And he loved that the Beatles would ‘rewind’ – throw it all out to start again – much as he did again and again with Apple products. he also said ‘if there’s a fire and you could take one box of masters. And if one was the Beatles and one was the Stones…he’d take the Beatles. The harder part was Dylan vs. Beatles. He felt he might have to stay in the house, because leaving with a world without one of them would be too hard.
1. Bob Dylan, These Times They Are a-Changing (With Joan Baez, Halloween 1964, Licoln’s Centre Philharmonic hall). He loved Dylan, launched all of Dylan’s works on the iPod. He resonated with this song and having collected all the bootlegs, liked the 1964 performance with Joan Baez the best. I can’t find this version, but here is Dylan in 65 doing the song live.
That’s it. Here’s another blog going in more detail on his favourite music and books.
Jimmy