>A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote speech about iTunes. People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the competition. They had 400,000 songs while Rhapsody and Napster had over 2 million songs. (Over 500,000 of those were from CD Baby.)

>Four minutes in, he said something that made my pounding heart sink to my burning stomach:

>“This number could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in every song. But we realize that record companies do a great service. They edit! Did you know that if you and I record a song, for $40 we can pay a few of the services to get it on their site, through some intermediaries? We can be on Rhapsody and all these other guys for $40? Well we don’t want to let that stuff on our site! So we’ve had to edit it. And these are 400,000 quality songs.”

In 2003, there were 2 special events with Steve Jobs keynotes about iTunes and he's referring to the 2nd one on October 16, 2003 (deep link to that quote) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvCJ613HORA&t=9m00s

(For trivia reference, the first one was April 28, 2003 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9o46zK5Jo)

>Whoa! Wow. Steve Jobs just dissed me hard! I’m the only one charging $40. That was me he’s referring to!

The author Derek Sivers left a lot of details out but here's how I interpret the situation ...

As prerequisite background, you can categorize "record labels" into 2 groups:

(1) the record label pays the artist for music via "advances", paying upfront recording costs, marketing etc. These are the traditional record labels like Warner, Universal, Sony, Motown, etc that "develop" the artist by making financial bets and losing money on most of the signed roster but making a profit a tiny number.

(2) the artists pay the "record label" -- where these entities are mostly used as a "distribution" intermediary. CD Baby and Tunecore would be typical examples.

Now look at the convoluted process with physical CDs that Apple forced CDBaby and other independents to use:

>The Apple guys said, “Sorry, you need to use this software; there is no other way.”

>Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.

That is basically a form of "proof-of-work". Apple didn't necessarily want everything from CD Baby. Instead, they just wanted the stuff CD Baby thought was worthwhile enough to expend time & effort to mess around with physical CDs.

The big labels didn't have to do that because they already did a form of "proof-of-work" via paying in advance for artists.

The issue is that Derek didn't "read between the lines" to understand what Steve Jobs and the convoluted upload process was trying to accomplish. I suppose business people could just speak plainly so they don't get mixed messages but sometimes they don't.

You forgot an important quote: “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.”

It seems pretty unambiguous to me.

That's a lot of unpaid mental gymnastics you're doing there to excuse Apple of their trademark shitty behaviour, and it _still_ doesn't negate the very black and white statement: “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.”

I think it's more likely that the iTunes software was just immature at that point.

What you're describing is a nice side effect of that for Apple, but the reality is they're not going to do the bitch work of importing all those songs from a hodge podge of whatever formats they're given. They didn't have a better tool available at that time to make their catalog consistent.

It's very believable that Apple felt enough urgency to rush this phase.

> I suppose business people could just speak plainly so they don't get mixed messages but sometimes they don't.

When you’re putting out a message to a large amount of people, no matter how much time and effort you spend trying to get the words just right so everyone understands, there’s always going to someone that misunderstands it and gets offended.

I’m a moonlit musician and this makes a lot of sense to me.