Steve Jobs: The iPod Is No Longer A Switcher Vehicle

June 17th, 2004 at 3:00 PM - News by Bryan Chaffin

Neil McIntosh of The Guardian (UK) has published the full transcript of an interview with Steve Jobs. That interview was the basis of a Guardian story on the launch of the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) in the UK, but Mr. McIntosh covered other areas in the interview that didnit make it into that story, and he decided to publish the full interview in his Guardian blog.

While we found the entire interview to be interesting, we wanted to bring your attention to a specific question about whether or not Apple was still using the iPod as a vehicle to bring Switchers to the Mac platform. According to Mr. Jobs, the answer to that question is no. From the interview:

NM: When the iPod was launched, you said it might lead people to the Mac platform. Does you still believe that?

SJ: "No. We brought the iPod to Windows. That was a big decision. That was basically a decision not to use the iPod to drive people to Macs. Weire going to use it as a music device, and weire going to put it on Windows. The majority of iPods we sell are used on Windows."

Mr. Jobs also addressed the issue of what took so long to bring the iTMS to Europe.

NM: Coming to Europe, were the negotiations more difficult than those you had in the US?

SJ: "No, they werenit more difficult. But the difficult thing was the rights. In the US, a company has the right to distribute a song. But in the UK, a different company has the right to distribute that same song. And maybe in Germany, a third company will have the right. And thereis no central database that tells you who to pay when you sell a song in the UK, versus Germany, versus France. We had to sit down with the labels and figure all this out. And thatis what took a long time – figuring out the rights issues.

"On other services, every song has a different set of rights attached to it. We didnit want that. The user should never have to worry about that. When they buy a CD they donit have to worry about what rights they have, and theyire the same for every CD they have. So I think what the big breakthrough for iTunes was that the rights – and the price – are the same for every song."

Thereis much more in the full interview, and we recommend it as a very interesting read.