
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010) - beshrkayali
http://sivers.org/itunes
======
jcampbell1
> I flew home that night, posted my meeting notes on my website, emailed all
> of my clients to announce the news, and went to sleep.

> When I woke, I had furious emails and voicemails from my contact at Apple.

How was this unexpected? Who goes to a business meeting with a potential
partner that can make your business soar, and then goes and blabs all over the
internet about the partner's business strategy. Who does that shit?

He literally published Apple's perfected pitch and detailed strategy online
the very next day:

[http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66729&cid=6133882](http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66729&cid=6133882)

Apple & CD Baby's partnership was ultimately very beneficial for both
companies, but Derek certainly went a bit overboard publishing those meeting
notes.

~~~
fakeer
>> _Who goes to a business meeting with a potential partner that can make your
business soar, and then goes and blabs all over the internet about the partner
's business strategy_

One who has thousands of people(and more who can be potential independent
businesses(musicians/singers) on his portal) to communicate to in a short time
and the other guy(business) who never mentioned[0] secrecy[1].

[0] Yes, you out to have done that. [1] Source: post.

~~~
jcampbell1
I agree that he needed to communicate with the artists. The problem is the
level of detail of the notes he shared. Did you read through his notes? Those
notes were a perfected business plan handed to Yahoo / eMusic / Rhapsody, and
a bit of a slap in the face to the major labels.

I have mixed feeling about whether it was right for Steve to be vindictive,
but I am certain I would be pissed.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Everything the guy did just screams amateur. The first issue is posting
information about a deal _before_ a contract has been signed. However, I'd
argue that the bigger issue is the $40 price tag that was slapped onto the
iTunes upload service. The record label is already making money off of its
customers through sales on iTunes; why on _Earth_ would you cheapen the
service by making it seem like anyone with $40 cash-in-hand can become part of
the iTunes catalog? The fact that the author made $200,000 (!) in iTunes
service sales alone says a lot.

~~~
jcampbell1
My understanding is CD Baby was never a 'label'. They chose a service model
and operated more like a fulfillment service. E.g. we will store and ship CDs
to customers for a fee, we will upload your stuff to iTunes for a fee, etc.
Charging $40 to upload to itunes seems very reasonable. If Apple wanted to
allow anyone anywhere to upload to iTunes with no quality control, they
wouldn't use partners like CDBaby.

Furthermore, it makes no sense to think Apple was pissed about the $40 since
that happened after Apple got pissed.

You can see CDBaby's pricing here: [http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-
cost.aspx](http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx)

It looks like a very fair deal for small artists to me.

> Everything the guy did just screams amateur.

I disagree. At the very least, he is very smart. If you read those notes, it
is clear that he has an incredible ability to distill and communicate what was
important.

------
robomartin
Brings back memories.

After a series of emails with Steve Jobs --all while I was coding at four in
the morning!-- my then partner and I flew to Cupertino for a meeting with VP's
directly under him and about thirty engineers and managers from various areas
of the organization. We brought with us nearly a million dollars of equipment
to put on a good demonstration and illustrate our technology. Apple asked us
to develop a product they needed. We threw a ton of money and effort at the
task and got it done in three months (a redesign of an existing product). They
started to promote the product, gave us a direct link on their website to
ours. It was amazing.

Six months later a cheaper (20% of our price) bad quality product (among other
things, there were reports of it catching fire) came into the scene. Apple
dropped us like a hot potato. We lost a ton of time and money on the deal.

Am I angry? Nope. I have enough experience dealing with large companies to
know you should go into these deals nearly expecting the worst corner cases.
This, I think, is certainly true for small companies. Besides, I had a
conversation with Steve Jobs at four in the morning. Perhaps that alone was
worth the cost of admission...and I am not even close to being an Apple fan
boy.

As for the OP, I don't think he was very wise in posting meeting info as he
did.

~~~
larrys
"Am I angry? Nope."

Usually when people do get angry about these things it's because _they don 't
have_ what you say next, in other words they haven't been around the block:

"I have enough experience"

More directly people get mad when you feel naive that you expected something
and were fooled. In other words "I'm loyal to that girl and now she cheated on
me". So you are mad at yourself for trusting and feeling fooled.

Sivers of course will most likely never make that type of mistake again. He
has learned from the situation. If he does do the same thing though it will be
with full knowledge of the possible outcome.

~~~
robomartin
And that's probably true. I can't remember the first time I felt I got shafted
(personally or in business) but I am sure I was fuming angry. There's truth to
the concept of growing a thick skin. You really need it for business.

------
psychotik
'Whatever. Fucking Apple.'

As a developer, I find myself saying that more often than I would like. Glad
this isn't just a developer thing that Apple does - it seems like a consistent
part of their DNA.

~~~
kbenson
Your _glad_ about that?

~~~
psychotik
You don't see the sarcasm there?

~~~
kbenson
No, I didn't. I'm happily wrong though. :)

I thought it was a bit of schadenfreude or just happiness that developers
weren't being singled out.

Poe's law is alive and well on HN, so I find it hard to spot sarcasm here
unless it's fairly overt.

------
aneth4
Not to be an apologist, but it seems like Apple's actions make a lot of sense.

First of all, who posts meeting notes from meetings with top executives when
given a heads up about upcoming products? NOBODY. Of course it's confidential
by default.

Second, Apple was right to presume a company charging to get music in the App
Store would likely provide lower quality music. Charging for access completely
reverses the motivation of record companies. Until they were ready to open the
floodgates, excluding companies that charged was a reasonable if rough quality
filter.

~~~
vacri
Wow.

In another thread, we have links to the Debian project leader politely and
directly talking to someone who is causing an issue for them, suggesting
pathways for a relatively win-win resolution. He got labelled as treating the
guy poorly.

Here we have Apple responding like a spoiled brat "What, how dare you do that!
Take it down! Now we're going to do stuff without telling you, changing the
bargain from our side, and make snide sideways remarks directed at you. We'll
cut off communication and you have to guess at why we're doing this" and they
get a pat on the head.

~~~
michaelhoffman
It's almost like the comments were posted by different people!

~~~
andrewflnr
I hope you don't mind when I use that one the next time someone brings up some
mystifying schism between comments made by "people on the Internet".

------
barbs
" Whatever. Fucking Apple"

Just about sums it all up, really.

~~~
themstheones
Story of my life!

------
skue
There's a great expression that is especially useful when dealing with big
companies: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately described by
incompetency." [1]

While it's tempting to think that Jobs was pulling all the strings, the
reality is that Apple is a large company where legal departments take forever,
internal debate occur, and communication is slow.

It sucks that Jobs made that $40 statement without someone vetting (or caring)
that they were negotiating with CDBaby and that's their price. It sucks that
Apple did not communicate better about the reason for the delay. But doing
enterprise deals is nothing like working with an individual, and in that
context I wouldn't simply assume that Apple/Jobs was being spiteful.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)

~~~
larrys
Look Jobs could be the way he is because he has things that people want (I
don't mean Apple products so much as what someone like Jobs is able to do for
someone economically).

If he didn't have those things nobody would pay attention to him or care about
him other than the base level that anyone cares about anyone day to day. He
knows that. Same as some pretty girls know why guys are interested in them.
(Or rich guys hopefully know why girls are interested in them). It's a
symbiotic relationship.

------
hobs
Long story short, dont trust others with your business. I have seen this
dozens of times where a smaller company gets really excited because they are
working with the big brute, and they get screwed because the big boy gets to
make all the terms, and if/when they break the contract or act like complete
assholes, you have really no recourse.

------
gesman
Big entities can afford to be arrogant and are well known to pay with promises
instead of money. Silicon Valley is full of skulls and bones of little guys
who got too excited too soon.

Business as usual until papers are fully signed and money in the bank.

~~~
mathattack
Really the second half. It's the money in the bank. :-)

~~~
gesman
Right. I'll ditch papers for money.

------
chris_wot
Yup, Steve Jobs was an arsehole.

~~~
kunai
This is why I think Apple will do better with Cook, Ive, Federighi, and
Schiller as the frontmen. They can collaborate and judge what's best
uninterrupted by the arrogant ramblings of Holy Jobs.

~~~
lostlogin
I suspect that Apple define success with their own metrics. There are a few
measures by which Apple is already the best - which areas do you think a Cook
Apple might target? From the short Post-Jobs era, I'd say that Apple was more
secretive, and quicker to acknowledge fault.

------
czr80
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1896189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1896189)

~~~
dualogy
Baffles me why the dupe-detector didn't work here? Exact URL after all, it
seems.

~~~
acro
It was submitted 945 days ago, if I remember correctly there is a time limit.

~~~
yen223
HN allows reposts after X amount of time. There are people out there, like
myself, who haven't read this article yet.

------
lolcraft
I'm somewhat amused that many here mention the amateurishness of Sivers'
behaviour, yet there's no mention of Jobs' passive-aggressive bullshit.

"But we realize 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?"

Dude, what a pompous douchebag. You got a problem with what I did, tell me.
Just don't screw around, sending mixed signals in a very roundabout way in the
hope that I get it, because you're too scared of any confrontation in your
Garden of Reality Distortion. I know Apple likes being this impenetrable
Kremlin, but this is just plainly taking pages from Stalin's Guide to
Management. "Did you know some CEO from a very successful tech company is a
pompous douchebag?..."

------
shin_lao
I think the problem was charging $ 40 to get to iTunes. Either you give the
full catalog or you don't but it shouldn't be something you can purchase.

~~~
msandford
The $40 was a service fee to cover the cost of having someone at CDBaby go
into the warehouse, pick up a copy of the CD, put it into the CD drive, type
in all the album, artist and track info and hitting "scan" and then putting it
back when things are done. Doesn't sound like that big of a deal, you could do
it for "free" yourself at home. But if CDBaby had to do 5000 of them there's a
real cost associated. For a lot of people it's worth $40 to not have to think
about anything and for it to "just work".

~~~
kefs
As I read the article, I couldn't figure out why Derek and cdbaby didn't just
script a solution to submit the data appropriately from his already amassed
archive (which he could then sell as another service on the side).

~~~
Daiz
Straight from the article:

>Then they showed the Apple software we'd all have to use to send them each
album. It required us to put the audio CD into a Mac CD-Rom drive, type in all
of the album info, song titles and bio, then click [encode] for it to rip, and
[upload] when done.

>I raised my hand and asked if it was required that we use their software.
They said yes.

>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.

>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.

~~~
kefs
Right.. but there are always ways around scripting repetitive tasks.. even if
we're talking about creating a virtual drive, building a virtual image,
querying and populating metadata from your db, and still using their transport
mechanism/software.. it should still be possible.

~~~
sauravc
I don't think was that easy to do all this virtualization stuff back in 2003.
And even if it was, why would he invest resources to do this when the artists
were willing to pay him?

------
oconnor0
It's interesting to me that Apple's complaint is that anyone could get their
crappy music into iTunes for $40 and that's a problem, but that free is fine.

------
dmourati
What you should have been doing (hindsight 20-20 and all that) was quietly
going around to the other hundred or so people and getting together on this.
Come through with one legal team representing the newly founded consortium and
then negotiate from a position of strength.

Sign the deal, get cash up front, and then begin the drudgery of complying
with Apple's byzantine requirements as a group.

~~~
tod222
You and only a few other commenters have recognized the abuse of power here:

> They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.

It would have been easy for Apple to work with entities such as CD Baby to
whip up an alternate method to handle the importation of large catalogs of
music. Once specified I'm sure such a trivial web API could be implemented and
tested quickly.

But Apple and Jobs didn't do this because they knew they had the power to
insist that their software be used even though it was only suited for single
CD submissions.

I find it interesting that many commenters are critical of Sivers while
completely overlooking Apple's abuse of power.

dmourati not only recognized the abuse of power but recommended a method for
meeting it head on.

------
thehme
Wow! The things to learn. I am not sure how I feel about this or what to get
out of it, although I am feeling a bit dizzy/warm. Should we buy music from
Apple or other "nicer" companies? Pretty messed up though what Jobs did,
although posting their business plan was most likely what made "them" angry. I
am with you though that if it was confidential, you should have been given
notice.

------
WalterBright
I saw a documentary on a guy who has amassed the largest vinyl record
collection in the world. The claim was made that 87% of all vinyl is not
available on CD or other formats.

It'd be nice to see all that back catalog stuff available. I know I have a
number of records that are good, but are not available digitally.

~~~
UniZero
Can you remember what that documentary was called? I would love to see that

~~~
WalterBright
It was on the Roku's PBS channel. It's called "The Archive" under "PBS Online
Film Festival".

------
danbmil99
TL; DR: Steve Jobs really was quite a dick

~~~
danbmil99
The fact that a statement like this will never be voted up says so much. Do we
rational hacker types really believe in ghosts? He did great shit, and he was
a dick. Is that so hard to accept?

------
Jd
"They had 300,000 songs while Rhapsody and Napster had over 2 million songs.
(Over 500,000 of those were from CD Baby.)"

Something about this does not compute.

~~~
mavroprovato
Of the 2 million songs available at Rhapsody and Napster, over 500,000 were
from CD Baby

~~~
Jd
If that's what it means, it is a bit misleading since it is combining two
other services (Rhapsody and Napster) against one (Apple).

~~~
MrDOS
I read it as him stating that Rhapsody and Napster each had around 2M songs,
and .5M of each were from CD Baby.

~~~
mh-
That is- they both had, with exceptions, the same 2 million songs. And of
those 2 million available, CD Baby provided some 500k of them.

------
bravoyankee
This has been on HN a bunch of times already. News is supposed to be new,
correct?

~~~
angersock
This story was news to me, and I haven't seen it in a couple of years here.

The only part here not news is Steve Jobs/Apple acting like jackasses--the
particulars of the story are interesting.

~~~
znowi
Interestingly, he was also a close mentor to Larry Page and Sergey Brin :)

~~~
_pmf_
> Interestingly, he was also a close mentor to Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The probably derived their "Don't be evil" from taking the reciprocal of what
Steve Jobs "mentored" them.

~~~
wavefunction
uh... and how's that working out.

Come on, "Don't be evil" is just clever marketing that a lot of people fell
for at first, and some still do.

~~~
ak39
Absolutely! This sort of jingoism at corporate level, the sort of moral
imperative front-facing cleverly marketed idealism is the new religion, I
swear. I can understand when a company puts itself "out there" with "Being the
best" or "Customer first" or some bullshit like that. But when the rhetoric
enters the realm of good ol' fashioned morality and talks about Good and Evil
.. yoh! ... Our bs sensors should now be howling, thanks to companies like
Google.

~~~
tyang
Please tell us what you REALLY think. :)

