When Steve Jobs speaks, people listen. Not only do they listen, but their jaws drop slack, a droplet of saliva drools to the chin to dry and the head nods in happy obedience.
That’s all well and good when you’re talking about hordes of mindless fanboys who have given over their souls to the Apple CEO and his product line, but it’s a bit disconcerting when you consider how well Jobs’ spiel plays in a media business desperate for new ideas on how to preserve itself. As we plow deeper into our Age of Non-Monetization, it’s easy to see the attraction to Jobs’ sales pitches, like the one he gave at the AllThingsD conference last night. There he once again struck his Jesus Christ pose, a would-be savior replete with the increasingly gaunt, almost ascetic visage that is so easy to submit to. It helps that he’s got the hardware, the closed-off ecosystems so difficult to disrupt, and the swelling market capitalization to boot.
He’s also got a great line that underlies his media-oriented addresses, even if he never quite drops it literally: I saved the music industry and, dear news providers, I can save you, too.
Too bad it isn’t true.
Growing digital music sales may be one of the few bright spots for the industry and Apple, with iTunes at more than 25% market share, is no doubt the foundation of that growth. Labels that have already hacked staff to the bone and committed to signing fewer artists are still in dire straits. And while Apple’s efforts have given these companies a glimmer of hope that they can sell their wares online, they haven’t come close to the righting an outmoded business model. (If you want to read a great overview of how the music business needs to change, Gizmodo has one.) To sum up, while iTunes isn’t the cause of the music industry’s problem, it’s also not the cure-all. At most, it’s a life-preserver.
Yet, by his words, you’d think the opposite. “The biggest lesson Apple has learned is: Price it aggressively and go for volume. And anytime we haven’t done that, we’ve had more attenuated success.”
Put simply, his pricing and distribution model in music downloads, while awesomely convenient for consumers and certainly better than anything the industry has come up with, hasn’t proved itself out for the record companies, as CD sales bottom-out. And it only follows that his advice for news organizations should be properly tested before it becomes part of conventional wisdom. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm observes two big bars to success that need to be cleared. The first is psychological:
The psychological flaw is that news stories and other forms of content that appear in newspapers and magazines (with very few exceptions) are not the same as music or even movies or books, in the sense that users want to keep them forever and read or watch them repeatedly, as media gurus Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis have also pointed out. In addition, all of that content is currently available in a completely legal way for nothing, from the websites of the content creators themselves, whereas music and movies are not.
The other is economic:
[C]utting this kind of deal would involve handing over control of a significant part of your newspaper or magazine’s destiny to Steve Jobs. Is that really a bargain that media outlets want to strike? It’s true that Apple has sold billions of songs through iTunes since the store launched, and that has done great things for one company: Apple. Record labels and movie studios, for the most part, haven’t seen truckloads of money come their way from the arrangement. If anything, iTunes pricing has put downward pressure on the prices they charge for CDs and DVDs.
But there are other reasons too for why Jobs is a bad shepherd for the business.
There’s Jobs’ bullying, litigious nature, manifesting now in its scorched-earth treatment of Gizmodo and there’s his disdain for corporate transparency. And his ideas of what the editorial landscape should look like are downright last century and scary.
I’m necessarily biased, but his cheap shot — “I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers” — where “blogger” sounds like a stand-in for anyone who exists outside the profoundly flawed structures of hulking mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that he (right now) lauds, is offensive. Or it should be to anyone who’d like a robust flow of news and opinion. But of course that lust for centralization makes sense when you consider how Apple is run as an organization (top-down), how it communicates (one-way) and how its products exist — in a controlled system whose main beneficiary is Apple.
That’s fine for a tech innovator, but it’s no way to support a free press.
