Steve Jobs was not into streaming music says Beats Audio founder

Beats Audio CEO Jimmy Iovine apparently tried for years to entice Steve Jobs into the concept of music subscription and music streaming. Jobs on the other hand never seemed very interested, according to an All Things D report.

In an interview yesterday with All Things D, Iovine said: “I was always trying to push Steve into subscription. And he wasn’t keen on it right away. [Beats co-founder] Luke Wood and I spent about three years trying to talk him into it… he didn’t want to pay the record companies enough. He felt that they would come down, eventually.”

Iovine realised that music is changing in the future with streaming and buying online becoming more popular than the usual way of just buying an album at the store. He does however feel that big tech companies are not the right choice to take on the task of streaming, stating that “tech guys can’t do that. They don’t even know who to hire. They’re utilities. Subscription needs a programmer. It needs culture.”

And if you look at the most proficient streaming services, they were all started by upstarts and not by established companies and corporations. Only Apple has been successful in changing the music industry in the way he sees it, therefore the obvious reason that Iovine panned the idea to Jobs.

In the meantime, Iovine is working on a forthcoming project called Project Daisy, a spin-off of Mog that will feature streaming music subscription across mobile platforms.

Image: Beats By Dre