Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

Esquire.
“So we said, ‘Let’s create a legal alternative to 
this.’ Everybody wins. Music companies win. The artists win. Apple wins. And the user wins, 
because he gets a better service and doesn’t have to be a thief.”
So Jobs set out to create an “iTunes Store” and to persuade the five top record companies to 
allow digital versions of their songs to be sold there. “I’ve never spent so much of my time trying 
to convince people to do the right thing for themselves,” he recalled. Because the companies were 
worried about the pricing model and unbundling of albums, Jobs pitched that his new service 
would be only on the Macintosh, a mere 5% of the market. They could try the idea with little risk. 
“We used our small market share to our advantage by arguing that if the store turned out to be 
destructive it wouldn’t destroy the entire universe,” he recalled.
Jobs’s proposal was to sell digital songs for 99 cents—a simple and impulsive purchase. The 
record companies would get 70 cents of that. Jobs insisted that this would be more appealing than 
the monthly subscription model preferred by the music companies. He believed that people had an 
emotional connection to the songs they loved. They wanted to 
own
“Sympathy for the Devil” and 
“Shelter from the Storm,” not just rent them. As he told Jeff Goodell of 
Rolling Stone
at the time, 
“I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be 
successful.”
Jobs also insisted that the iTunes Store would sell individual songs, not just entire albums. That 
ended up being the biggest cause of conflict with the record companies, which made money by 
putting out albums that had two or three great songs and a dozen or so fillers; to get the song they 
wanted, consumers had to buy the whole album. Some musicians objected on artistic grounds to 
Jobs’s plan to disaggregate albums. “There’s a flow to a good album,” said Trent Reznor of Nine 
Inch Nails. “The songs support each other. That’s the way I like to make music.” But the 
objections were moot. “Piracy and online downloads had already deconstructed the album,” 
recalled Jobs. “You couldn’t compete with piracy unless you sold the songs individually.”
At the heart of the problem was a chasm between the people who loved technology and those 
who loved artistry. Jobs loved both, as he had demonstrated at Pixar and Apple, and he was thus 
positioned to bridge the gap. He later explained:
When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don’t understand creativity. 
They don’t appreciate 
intuitive
thinking, like the ability of an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a 
hundred artists and have a feel for which five might be successful. And they think that creative people 
just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they’ve not seen how driven and 
disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are. On the other hand, music companies are 
completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that 
would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We’d get second-rate A&R people, just like 
the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I’m one of the few people who understands 
how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes 
real discipline.
Jobs had a long relationship with Barry Schuler, the CEO of the AOL unit of Time Warner, and 
began to pick his brain about how to get the music labels into the proposed iTunes Store. “Piracy 
is flipping everyone’s circuit breakers,” Schuler told him. “You should use the argument that 

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because you have an integrated end-to-end service, from iPods to the store, you can best protect 
how the music is used.”
One day in March 2002, Schuler got a call from Jobs and decided to conference-in Vidich. Jobs 
asked Vidich if he would come to Cupertino and bring the head of Warner Music, Roger Ames. 
This time Jobs was charming. Ames was a sardonic, fun, and clever Brit, a type (such as James 
Vincent and Jony Ive) that Jobs tended to like. So the Good Steve was on display. At one point 
early in the meeting, Jobs even played the unusual role of diplomat. Ames and Eddy Cue, who ran 
iTunes for Apple, got into an argument over why radio in England was not as vibrant as in the 
United States, and Jobs stepped in, saying, “We know about tech, but we don’t know as much 
about music, so let’s not argue.”
Ames had just lost a boardroom battle to have his corporation’s AOL division improve its own 
fledgling music download service. “When I did a digital download using AOL, I could never find 
the song on my shitty computer,” he recalled. So when Jobs demonstrated a prototype of the 
iTunes Store, Ames was impressed. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for,” he 
said. He agreed that Warner Music would sign up, and he offered to help enlist other music 
companies.
Jobs flew east to show the service to other Time Warner execs. “He sat in front of a Mac like a 
kid with a toy,” Vidich recalled. “Unlike any other CEO, he was totally engaged with the 
product.” Ames and Jobs began to hammer out the details of the iTunes Store, including the 
number of times a track could be put on different devices and how the copy-protection system 
would work. They soon were in agreement and set out to corral other music labels.