Sony's US Chairman: "Steve Jobs Has Liberated Us."

by , 8:00 AM EDT, June 26th, 2003

In a recent article about the state of the music industry, Reuters took a look at the problems the industry is having, and how it plans to get itself out of its current rut. Most interesting, however, is a quote from Sony's US Chief Executive and Chairman, Howard Stringer. He calls Apple's iTunes Music Store a "wake-up call," and said that "Steve Jobs has liberated us." From the article:

S. Chief Executive and Chairman Howard Stringer said at a media breakfast that the April launch of Apple Computer Inc.'s online music service, iTunes, which lets music fans download some songs from all five major record labels for less than a $1 each, was a "sea change" and a "wake-up call."

"Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) has liberated us," Stringer told media executives and journalists at a breakfast hosted by The New Yorker and Syracuse University's Newhouse School.

"We're all doing the same things and providing our own solutions ... In the technology age, everything can be duplicated quickly."

The article goes on to discuss how Mr. Stringer endorses the pursuit of litigation against music thieves and pirates, and other related issues. You can read the full article at Yahoo! Finance.

The Mac Observer Spin:

It's great to hear an industry bigwig singing the praises of Apple's iTunes Music Store. It is our opinion that the iTMS will not only be big in and of itself, but that it will be the beginning of something bigger, namely widespread legal online music distribution. We also find it interesting that Mr. Stringer is publicly laying so much credit specifically at the feet of Steve Jobs.

That said, before you start running around thinking Mr. Stringer is one of the few in the music industry that "gets it," note that he really only partially gets it. He seems to be on the right track as far as online music distribution goes; in other words, he seems to understand that if you offer music online in a way people want it, they will buy it. Perhaps we are reading too much into it, but that's the inference we took from his comments. He also seems to realize that lowering the price of CDs will be helpful, something the entire industry has tried hard to not understand, and that an "absence of any major new break-out acts" is hurting the industry.

On the other hand, he thinks that 'piracy' is a large part of the reason why the industry is in a slump, and that widespread litigation will improve the industry's situation. Piracy is hurting the industry (and yes, we condemn piracy and pirates, even while condemning the industry that has worked so hard to encourage pirates by being idiots for the last decade, if not longer), but widespread litigation isn't going to do a thing other than alienate that industry's customers. This is especially true if the lawsuits are pursued before services following the iTMS's business model make it to the Windows world. These suits are short-sighted, at best.

Still, the comments from Mr. Stringer offer a glimmer of hope that some within the industry may be slowly realizing what they are doing wrong. Perhaps other execs are getting it, too. Apparently, at least according to Mr. Stringer, we can thank Steve Jobs for that.

Yahoo Finance