(Image: Rollingstone.com)
I found another interview with Steve Jobs by Rollingstone.com. It’s from December 3, 2003.
Here are some of Steve’s comments that I found most interesting:
Interviewer: When is Apple going to start signing musicians — in effect, become a record label?
“Well, it would be very easy for us to sign up a musician. It would be very hard for us to sign up a young musician that was successful. Because that’s what the record companies do. Their value is in picking that 1 out of 5,000. We don’t do that.
We think there’s a lot of structural changes that are probably gonna happen in the record industry, though. We’ve talked to a large number of artists that really don’t like their record company, and I was curious about that. And the general reason they don’t like the record company is because they think they’ve been really successful, but they’ve only earned a little bit of money.”
Interviewer: They feel they’ve been ripped off.
“They feel. But then, again, the music companies aren’t making a lot of money right now … so where’s the money going? Is it inefficiency? Is somebody going to Argentina with suitcases full of hundred-dollar bills? What’s going on?And it turns out, after talking to a lot of people, this is my conclusion. A young artist gets signed, and they get a big advance — a million dollars, or more. And the theory is that the record company will earn back that advance as the artist is successful.
Except that even though they’re really good at picking, still, only one or two out of the ten that they pick is successful. And so, for most of the artists, they never earn back that advance — so they’re out that money. Well, who pays for the ones that are the losers?”
Interviewer: Kid Rock.
“The winners pay. The winners are paying for the losers, and the winners are not seeing rewards commensurate with their success. And so they get upset. So what’s the remedy? The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and to tell an artist: We’ll give you 20 cents on every dollar we get … but we’re not gonna give you an advance.The accounting will be simple: We’re gonna pay you not on profits — we’re gonna pay you off revenues. It’s very simple: The more successful you are, the more you’ll earn. But if you’re not successful, you will not earn a dime. We’ll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you, and we’ll be out. But if you’re not successful, you’ll make no money — but if you are, you’ll make a lot more. That’s the way out. That’s the way the rest of the world works.”
Interviewer: So you see the recording industry moving in that direction?
“No. I said: I think that’s the remedy. Will the patient swallow the medicine is another question.”
You can read the whole interview here.