All big companies spin and backtrack and screw people over, but what I think sets apple apart is their lack of communications. If you're going to screw me over please go ahead and tell me, preferably with a little notice. Don't make me stew in my stress flying my business blind. It is a lack of respect.
Reading this I realized how scary Apple's reputation is, like you should expect them to do spiteful things. I hear invited to be pitched by Steve, pissed off their legal department, no answer... I would be wetting myself.<p>Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect.
"Whatever. Fucking Apple.<p>We started encoding and uploading immediately."<p>What really struck me about this post is that he went back to Apple after being disrespected so hard. The lesson is there are times when you have to swallow a big lump of pride in order to better your business. I know I would have a hard time doing that.
Playing the devil's advocate here.<p>I have bought more than a couple of CDs from CD Baby and thanks to them I've been able to connect with more than a couple of wonderful artists.<p>However, from Apple's perspective, it must have seemed like CD Baby was simply trying to make a profit simply by guaranteeing access to the Apple Store, and therefore Apple decided not to move forward in order to protect its brand.
I really don't understand everyone's reverence for Steve Jobs, but to me this shows how evil and manipulative he is ( not the first time hearing this about him). What people call timing, I call intentional to openly put it out there they want these independents, have others follow their lead and open their stores to independent artists, and then openly and publicly call every other service out there a joke because they let anyone on. Then the next day signing the contract. I highly doubt its all just coincidental.
Steve jobs may be a much greater innovator. But surely, can learn a thing or two, on integrity, from Derek Sivers.<p>Also this is a lesson in on how to have <i></i>only<i></i> loosely-coupled relations/dependencies with other companies (particularly, if they are big).<p>When need to go for tightly-coupled ones dependencies, expect it to break, and have a back-up plan.
Wow. Really interesting to see Steve spin the smaller music collection of iTunes as a positive. I think this is going to make me consider his words more closely in the future.
"I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.<p>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."<p>It would take about a day for a competent programmer to figure out how to automate this process.
This is similar in a sense to how Adobe mishandled their "Flash on iOS" play, right from the start. They took it for granted that Apple would allow Flash-developed apps on the App Store.
I'm no going to defend Apple here, really, but rather to point out that Apple tends to <i>understaff</i>, and what may read as malignancy from the outside can often be more charitably explained by too few people working too many hours.
"Maybe you can't appreciate this now, but the summer of 2003 was the biggest turning point that independent music has ever had."<p>This has always struck me as interesting point from a music fan's perspective. It seems like the confluence of a lot of factor's led to expansion of independent music around this time.<p>2001, 2002 was around when cable and DSL prices started to drop outside of major cities. The opening of Itunes. And seemingly a lot of big time independent artists began to jump to major labels (or made major releases from smaller labels) and released very successful albums. Death Cab for Cutie, The Shines, and Modest Mouse off the top of my head.<p>Just an interesting phenomena I've always been curious about. This article was eye opening as to what one of the key forces in this move might have been.