The Perfect Thing | Steven Levy | Talks at Google

I'm here to welcome Steven Levy as part of our Authors at Google series. Some of you are probably familiar with him. He's a senior editor and chief technology correspondent and also the writer of the Technologist column for Newsweek magazine. He is considered one of the pioneers of technology journalism, having written since 1981 and he's been with Newsweek since 1995. He's also written numerous Google stories, some of which I'm sure I hope you guys have all read, one of them being the COVID pre IPO the New Age of Google and let's see, prior to or actually while he was freelancing, his work has also appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and Premier. He's also been a contributor to to Wired magazine since its inception. He grew up in Philly and is an Eagles fan still, and currently he resides in New York and also Western Massachusetts with his family. Additionally, he's also an author of six books. The first was Heroes of the computer revolution in 1984, which PC Magazine named the best zaitai book written in the last 20. The second book was the Unicorn Murder in the Age of Aquarius in 1988. Artificial the quest for a new creation, 1992 insanely great the Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed everything in 1994 how the code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age this is a story of revolution in cryptography that won the Grand E book prize the 2001 Frank Curtis. And now, during the fifth anniversary of the ipod, he is here to speak about the perfect thing, how the ipod shuffles commerce, culture, and coolness. Afterwards, he'll also be available to sign your books. So stick around and please join me in welcoming Steven Levy.

Thanks Eileen. It's really great to be here and it's really nice that Eileen introduced me. I've been working with Eileen since before she got to Google, right? She helped walk me through the treacherous shoals of writing about the Sony PlayStation, an experience I'm sort of repeating now. Anyway, as I say, it's great to be here. Eileen was reading over the list of the book books I'd previously written, and this one, unlike some of the others where I was looking for a topic and trying to figure out what would be best to write, this one sort of found me. I had written about the Macintosh and insanely great, and I thought, well, there's my Apple book. But five years ago to the day Monday, Steve Jobs said that he was going to have an announcement of something that's not A Mac. And I didn't go to that announcement because if you recall, something else was happening in the world in 2001, just a few weeks after the World Trade Center. And to be honest, I was having sort of a crisis, a little dark night of the soul there, along with just about everyone else in the city. I live in New York City. I was having a big dilemma by wondering about what the impact of this incident, this disaster was on the course that I was pursuing, and I've been pursuing, as Eileen said, for a long time. I wrote Hackers in 1984, and I had started writing about technology a couple years before then, really coming from not a technical background, but an English major sort of background, where I stumbled across what I sensed and the intervening years proved was the great story of our time. And that is how computer technology, and now the Internet, is changing everything about us. It's changing really who humans are. And I thought, a few hundred years from now, if we're not destroyed by some horrible disaster, people will look back on this time, on these years since the invention of the computer and now the Internet, and say, really, what was it like in that time? What was it like when everything changed back then? And I thought, well, isn't this great? I've got a front row seat to the big story of our times. And now living in that city and literally smelling what happened from my house, which is downtown, I was feeling differently. I was asking, gee, that dependent clause, what I said before, if we're not destroyed, what about that? And I wondered, should I really be flying out to Apple to see some sort of device that's not a Macintosh, when the big story is happening before me, when the forces of darkness are sitting upon us? When I was writing this book, I went back and looked at my email to try to reconstruct how the exchanges went between me and the people at Apple. And literally the day I received the invitation to the event that introduced the Macintosh, there was a long email from the people who or the human resources people at Newsweek explaining how to get our mail. We had had an anthrax scare, you remember, that came right on the heels of the World Trade disaster. And we had to get our mail. We had to put on latex gloves and go to a special room where everything was irradiated and if something looked funny, we had to press an alarm. And. And this was the world that had invaded my world, which was covering great stuff and exciting things. So I didn't go to Cupertino that day. The ipod came to me. They Brought a courier. And I actually had an interesting incident that night. I got the ipod and set it up. And that happened to be the same week that Microsoft was releasing Windows xp. They were having a launch in New York City the next day. And they had a little dinner for journalists the night before. And I brought my ipod along and I was sitting next to Bill Gates at this dinner. So I interviewed him a number of times and he sort of put me next to him because I sort of knew how to handle him. It is actually true that one journalist, I will not mention his name because he's fairly prominent, once broke into tears during a Bill Gates interview. And the worst that happened to me is he once threw a pencil at me when we were discussing some of the finer points of antitrust law. But I said, bill, have you seen this? And I reached in my pocket and here it was. And. And his eyes kind of went back. He had heard about it but hadn't seen it. And it was like a scene from a science fiction movie that maybe I've seen, maybe I haven't seen, where an alien comes to Earth and they have this ability to kind of grock any item. He can zero in on it and kind of suck up all the information. He immediately went, turned it on and started spinning it, pressing the buttons, going through every menu. And you could see it was just absorbing the information until finally emerged from that like 45 second master tour and said, this is a pretty good product. He said, it's only for Mac. So it was then. But I dutifully went through the motions and loaded the thing up with CDs. It actually came with a big brick full of CDs that Apple sent because they didn't want to be accused of encouraging anyone from stealing music to put. Put it on there. So I think they might have some music preloaded the first time around. So they had all the CDs. It was kind of interesting. Have you seen the movie? Was it Manhattan, I believe, where Woody Allen sits there and thinks of all his favorite things, the things that make life worth living. These were sort of some of the albums that made life worth living for Steve Jobs. There was like the Bob Dylan album, the Ella Fitzgerald album. And there was some stuff, some concessions, I guess, to other genres, but tasteful stuff. And I filled the thing up and I started listening to it and went around. And one day, maybe about a week after I had the ipop, I had it in the subway and I discovered the shuffle function, which Steve didn't make a very big deal of that in the launch, he did a relatively low key launch in Cupertino on campus. And just in a laundry list of features, he said, oh, you could shuffle all the songs. What I was discovering when you had a lot of songs on there, that's actually a really good way to kind of go through them in a hurry. And plus you have this novelty that happened sometimes you would forget you put a song on there and you'd rediscover it. So I went to the subway and I remember the song, it was my back pages, the version by the birds that just came on. And suddenly this subway, which isn't the greatest place in the world normally the New York subway, just almost like went from black and white to technicolor. And that song in particular, it just had a lot of associations for me. I remember hearing it, I remember the Bob Dylan version and I loved the Birds version. And it just sounded great. And it sort of made a little turning point for me. And I don't want to belittle 9, 11. Certainly we live with it every day in New York City and we live with it in this country. But it helped get me back on a path where I could get excited again about technology and what that stuff was. So I got excited about the ipod a little. But it really wasn't until a couple years later when I did a cover story for Newsweek about the ipod that I realized that it actually was becoming a cultural phenomenon. And I decided that's really some of the things I wanted to talk about in this book, which is different from my other books. In that most of my other books I'm talking about how the thing came to be and the people who made it. And I do get into that here. I do tell the story of how the ipod came about and the characters who were behind it. I follow some of the historical strains about MP3 and things like that. But there's a lot in this book about what happened after the ipod came out and how it affected us and how it's going to affect us. The culture of the ipod. The name of the book is how the ipod shuffles after. The perfect thing, I'll get to that in a second, is how the ipod shuffles, culture, commerce and coolness. And the word shuffle is very deliberate there because as I indicated, shuffle to me is just the essence of the ipod. Apple sort of realized this a little into it when they took shuffle and it used to be buried two menus down and put it in the very top menu. I'm just curious how many people Here have ipods. Why am I not surprised how many people shuffle? The ipod is the main way. I'm always surprised I know it's a good number. I'm always surprised there's not more. And I often tell people, you haven't shuffled. And they say, well, I don't know, I've got a classical music thing. And I can't imagine this bumping against that. Some people are sort of control freaks with playlists. But I always say, if you're going on a plane trip, you got your ipod. Maybe you could just uncheck some of the symphonies and just use shuffle, because it's an amazing way to get novelty and excitement and even mystical things. And one thing that happened to me when I was shuffling is one artist, Steely Dan, kept coming up with unbelievable regularities. So much so that I actually questioned whether the randomness in the shuffle was really random. And this happened just consistently. I'd be there, the day would play Ricky, Don't Lose that Number. And then two songs later it would be Kid Charlemagne. And I won't go through the whole catalog here, but you get the idea. And I thought, does my ipod really like Steely Dan so much? Can this be so one day I was at a Macworld Expo and I worked for Newsweek, and I have a rapport with Steve. I talked to him pretty much after every product launch about whatever it is. And this time at the end of our conversation, I said, steve, I've got to ask you this question. Is shuffle really random? And he acted like he never heard, what are you talking about? And I explained to him about Steely Dan. And he said, well, let me get so and so on the phone. He wouldn't tell me who. Steve's very secretive about who works for Apple sometimes. And he's like, am I telling you the guy's name? I'm calling him up and he'll know. So he called up an engineer down at Cupertino. We were at Moscone center in San Francisco, and I talked to the guy and he said, oh, yeah, sure, sure, it's utterly random. But I still wasn't sure. And I kept asking people, does your ipod play favorites? And almost no one seemed to think that random was random. Now, I know a little bit about cryptography. I wrote a book about it in my previous book. And so I knew it didn't have to be national security style random, right, in order to get what felt like being random. But it just seemed odd to me. So I started calling up some mathematicians and cryptographers. And to give me like an indication of what went wrong here. And basically they convinced me that the way things cluster, and there's probably some mathematicians in the audience who could affirm this or maybe object to, would be actually more unusual if some artists didn't come up in clusters. So, and we went through a lot of, you know, examples, and one person actually said to me, well, we just see patterns where patterns don't exist. And a whole industry flies because of this. And that industry is based in Nevada. So I sort of came to the conclusion, you know, the randomness is in, you know, is in the ipod, but not in ourselves, let's say. And I wrote a column about that and I got an amazing response to the column, which gave me an insight not only to the way some of the randomness feels on the ipod, but the passion people had about their ipods. I'm going to share with you some of these letters or emails I got after that column came out. Now, there were first this group of people whose ipods also love Steely Dan. Your article is very interesting, especially since both our ipods tend to favor Steely Daniel. Well, I don't mind. It would be nice to hear the Modest Mouse. I download it every once in a while. I too, have the same problem. As you pointed out in your article in the ipod and Steely Dan, Reelin in the Ears is the first song almost every time. Oddly enough, my mini ipod seems to favor the dancers as well. I swear it repeats Cousin Dupree far more than any other song on my playlist. And there's a little paranoia here. You know how secretive Apple is. Maybe one of the reasons they keep things so close to the vest is they're contemplating and gradually achieving total world domination. Now, there were people whose ipods played different favorites. Let's see, I have 1500 songs on mine. The ipod has a distinct like this for Pearl Jam and Radiohead. Here's Linkin park and Don Davis. Mine seems to be sweet on Lisa Stanfeld played four in a row over tracks on Shuffle Green Day. Patti Smith in invariably plays because the night and people have the power accident. I think not. My shuffle loves Elvis. So then that was the favorite artist strain. There was another kind of strain. Some people actually talked about what their ipod doesn't like because I said my ipod never played Wild Thing. I actually bought Wild thing on the iTunes music store and I thought, you know, every so often I'm playing shuffle Wild Thing would come up. Wouldn't that be great? Never came up. So this one, this one isn't about iPods. I have to read it though. It is not just ipods. I have a Sony multidisk CD player that has a fondness for Led Zeppelin and dislikes playing Johnny Hartman. In fact, two Johnny Hartman disks were broken in two by the rotating tray. So now then there's another strain I call the X Files of ipod shuffle. Really strange stuff. Like I have all the Beatles songs from every album and get back 18 times. One other song, Taxman twice. This guy's keeping charts. But plus it has moods Sunday and Monday nights. Mine gets bluesy, rocks at night during the week, does folk on Monday and Wednesday mornings, bluegrass on Thursday mornings. Weird things. Like it started playing Bob Dylan every other song when my girlfriend was in the car. Then she complained the whole day about it and the next day she was in the car. It played Bob Dylan songs by other people. Most glaring is how irritating my ipod is. It only seems to play Christmas music in summer and never around Christmas. That's one for Bill O'Reilly, the war against Christmas. Right? Then it gets really weird. As a person with a very high ESP level, have you concluded, considered that you are the well at the card factor in your ipod's random shuffle and. And are influencing it to play songs you wanted to hear? Hadn't thought of that. So it goes on. But what it showed me was two things. One is we really maybe haven't solved the mystery of ipod shuffle. And the second is people have this passion for ipods. And it was about that time I thought, yeah, maybe I will go off and get a book and do a book on this. Because this is a story which goes beyond origin. It's really something that affects us all. And particularly because I think shuffle really goes beyond the ipod in its significance. Shuffle really, to me, is the trait of the digital age. When we go on the web, it used to be when we bought a newspaper, we were bound to what we read in that newspaper. Now we go on the web and we shuffle the news. Your you read an article in the Times, you read an article in Newsweek, of course, and you shuffle the news. Shopping, we're not bound to the department store anymore or the mall. You go and you shuffle your shopping. For one second you could be in a store in Seattle and next in Paris and wherever. And with the ipod going into podcasts, we shuffle radio television shows. We're shuffling the television schedule now. That grid that the programmers and the networks used to put up which determined when we'd watch TV shows, that's all gone. So I thought shuffle really beyond the ipod stood for something besides being the most pleasurable thing on the ipod to me. So I did something a little unusual, actually. In this book, I decided that I would shuffle the chapters. Now, early on, when I was thinking about how I'd write this book, I realized, yeah, I'm going to tell the story about how the ipod came to be and talk about the origin, but I was also going to talk about different aspects of the ipod. You can almost call the book 9 Ways of Looking at an Ipod. And each chapter is sort of a self contained essay. So I felt that maybe what I should do, since it would be relatively arbitrary which way I'd order the chapters, was I would actually shuffle the chapters. So the first chapter in every book is always the chapter called Perfect. It's the introduction and then the rest of them. What I literally did this summer was wrote the names of the chapters on ping pong balls and put them in a bag. And I had my son and my niece, to whom the book is dedicated, pull the ping pong ball. And we made about 12 shuffles. And I picked four, which seemed to make the most sense for readers. Sort of important to me to make sure the readers had a good experience. But each book is a product of a somewhat random shuffle there. So it was pretty interesting getting Simon and Schuster to go along with it, interestingly. And I'll get into this because I think people at Google like to know how things are done. The toughest part wasn't printing the books because printers, you know, publishers are used to relatively small printing. So to break up a printing into four parts isn't that hard. It's not even that hard to do four different indexes. With the magic of computer technology, indexing is a lot easier than it used to be. The tough part was actually getting the mix of books in a box when it arrived at the bookstore because I didn't want people to go to one bookstore and they'd all be the same shuffle. I really wanted like a stack of books and you pick one off and the next one was have a different order of books. I thought that was going to be really cool. And actually I was in a Barnes and Noble this past weekend, first time I saw it in a store like that. And I looked it up and they did it and they didn't object to it. The production people at Simon Schuster, for them, it was the most interesting thing they've done in a long time. They usually do the same thing. Usually they just put the books in the box right that's why they had to figure out how to mix them up. Actually, I wish I had more detail about how they figured out how to solve that problem. That's pretty interesting. The other thing I want to talk about before I get into a couple other aspects of the ipod and then certainly take your questions because I'm sure you've got some great ones, is why I called it the perfect thing. Now, the ipod is not perfect in every way. Let me put it this way. It's not flawless. The batteries, they sort of fade sometimes, like a winter sunset. There's no on off switch. Some people like an on off switch. The digital rights management in some ways isn't all that intrusive. But the idea that you buy a song, you buy a song from the itunes store and you can't play it on competing devices, I don't like that. I feel that you buy a song, you should be able to play it wherever you want. And likewise, if you buy a song on some competing store, Apple should go out of its way to make sure you can play it on an ipod. What's wrong with that? So in some ipods, it's not exactly scratch proof, let's put it that way. That black nano I call the CS iPod because it holds fingerprints so well. But in another sense, the ipod is perfect. And that's sort of in the perfect storm sense, because it seems to me that to bring together all the issues of the digital age, all the things that I've been writing about for years, from the pleasures of computer technology and the Internet to the possibilities, the way it breaks up business models, it's all there. So really, the ipod is the perfect storm, in a good way, of the digital era. And certainly the other thing is moments like my back pages moment. There's some time when the right song comes up, the right time, and you hold this gorgeous little thing, the new ones are even more gorgeous. You just say perfect. So that's why I called it the perfect thing. I want to get into a couple more cultural issues because they're fun to talk about in the ipod. Before I take the question. One is the nature of the ipod being a personal item. I want to read something that Andrew Sullivan wrote about the ipod if I could find it. Sullivan. You know who he is? He's a writer. Who? He's a writer. He does a blog for time. He's. All kinds of things. He came to New York one day. I can't find his thing here. And essentially was astounded at the quiet. It seemed to Envelope New York City. He couldn't figure out it's not as noisy it used to be. And he wrote, there were little white wires hanging from their ears. The people around or tucked into pockets, purses or jackets. The eyes were a little vacant. Each was in his or her own musical world, walking to their soundtrack stars in their own music video, almost oblivious to the world around them. These are the ipod people. Even without the white wires, you could tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own MP3 cocoon, bumping into each other's deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble. Walk through any airport in the United States today and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on autopilot. Get on the subway and you're surrounded by a bunch of Stepford commuters staring into mid space as if anesthetized by technology. Don't ask, don't tell, don't overhear, don't observe. Just tune in and tune out. This is sort of a strain of criticism that's been directed to the ipod and the people use it. And it's true. If you go on a subway in New York, there's a lot of people wearing the ipod. You go into the gym, it's hard to find someone without an ipod. Actually, I just saw that Nike found that three times as many people exercise in music as did a few years ago. And a lot of people think this is a terrible thing. And I wanted to look back on this because I know that there was a strain of criticism that came out very similar in the Walkman era. But I actually traced it back a little earlier to that I met this fascinating guy named Andreas Pavel. Have any of you ever heard of Andreas Pavel? Total blank. Well, he was the person who invented personal audio. When I say personal audio, I mean a high quality portable experience you take with you, like the Walkman and now in the Apex and the ipod. He's a German born Brazilian who in 1972 was sort of a dabbler in many things, like a dilettante. He studied philosophy, he was sort of an engineer in some things. And he lived down in Sao Paulo and he would invite friends over his house and they would sit in these big cushions. He had sort of a dome like home. Not exactly a dome, but a high ceiling. They'd look at the ceiling, they light up a few joints and really enjoy music. And he had this idea of whether you could take music with you. And he got one of the first portable Sony cassette players, some shoebox size thing, mainly to record interviews, not music. But he thought the output was good enough to power a pair of high quality speakers. And that was the time the first open air speakers were coming out. He got these Sennheiser speakers and he got some guy in a radio store to help hook him up with the thing. And so he hooked up the speakers to headphones, to two headphones, and he went on a vacation to Switzerland with his girlfriend, who was a beautiful dancer. And one day they took a walk in the woods with this device which he called a stereo belt, because you had to hook it to your belt and you carry it around, it did not fit in your pocket. And they played the song Push Push by Herbie Mann, this jazz flutist. It was an album that just came out with these extended jazz riffs between Herbie Mann and Duane Ullman, just recorded a couple months before Duane Allman died, the guitarist. And it started to snow and they were transported. It was an amazing experience. And he said, we were in another world. And we walked and we talked and we danced. And a strange thing happened to them in this experience, which he actually did describe the drug like experience as they came across another couple walking through the woods. And the people totally freaked out, what's going on here? What are you doing? And they were the first, I guess, version of the Andrew Sullivans of the world who were saying, how dare you go in a cocoon and enjoy yourself and build that experience without me. And I think that's part of the animosity that people show towards the ipod people. And this thing came up again. I looked at the history of the Walkman. It was kind of interesting. When the Walkman was being developed, Akio Marita, the co founder of Sony, and at least in his autobiography, the father of the Walkman, talked about bringing a prototype home one night and his wife was complaining that he was sitting, listening to these headphones on this prototype. And he thought, you know, I should add a second earphone jack. And then he did that. And then one day he was taking a prototype, showing it to a friend, and they went golfing together and they wanted to talk about the music. They couldn't do that. So he. He figured maybe there should be a way we could have a conversation while we're both listening to music together on this portable device. And he told his engineers to do that. And in the original Walkman, I don't know if any of you remember this, there was this orange hot button, this little microphone that you could walk around with a friend and say, yeah, that was good. But as it turned out, if the Wolfman came out, no one used a second headphone jack and certainly no one used that button. This was a personal device. And it was a device Sony found used for two things, two things that the personal audio did for you. One was escape, meaning just checking out of your environment and being somewhere else. It was especially helpful if say you were a woman and you didn't want to be approached by some guy in a bus or on the street or in the gym. It's sort of little protective arm or it helped you out. But the more important part was something called enhancement, what it did. And so I found some sociological studies which really built on this and interviewed a lot of people about this. Was it enabled you to really alter your own environment. And actually William Gibson, the science fiction writer, said that he can't think of a more powerful device to change our environment than the Walkman in the way it did that people built their own soundtracks. And I found one sociologist who did a lot of studies, talked to people. This is kind of disturbing. A lot of people he talked to. The soundtracks they had were sort of the violent movies like Pulp Fiction and things like that. And people imagine themselves characters in these violent movies, kind of sort of gunning people down as they looked around in the subway. But for the ipod, of course, it's even more powerful because the soundtrack is, is ever changing. It could just change the tenor of what's around you on a dime. So I think that that's really fascinating. And I also have to say I'm not disturbed too much at all, except maybe for the danger of stepping in front of a bus or something like that. If you don't hear what's going on about walking around with those earbuds. The fact is, to me, subways aren't where I do my social networking. And I'm much happier to pass the commute listening to my ipod than I am interacting with the people or sometimes icons that can get you into trouble there. The third thing I want to talk about before I take questions is another element of the ipod which I call identity. So sort of the mantra of our day is what's on your ipod? And any number of magazines have this. Ask this question to various celebrities. The question comes up in an unbelievable amount of venues. I was watching a mayoral debate in New York City and it was unusual because the front running candidate, Mayor Bloomberg, decided not to participate in the debate because he didn't like the idea that a third party candidate was on there. So they had the third party candidate and the Democrat up there in an empty seat. And one of the questions was, do you have an ipod? And I thought, gee, this is odd. Why would you ask that question? Weirdly, neither of the candidates did. But I later found out that Bloomberg did. I actually checked this out. And he listens to Spanish language instruction tapes, sounds on his. But it seems that everyone now has an ipod. And of course, George Bush has an ipod. You all know that, right? This came out, actually after the election, which I found a little suspicious, because it turned out one of the songs on his ipod was My Sharona. And I'm convinced if we known that before the election, Ohio would have gone the other way and history would have been different. And Dick Cheney has an ipod. His daughters gave him an iPad, which he listens to in undisclosed locations. I'm sure the carpenters are on his ipod, as you might imagine. And there's a funny Dick Cheney story with the ipod, though. When he went to Baghdad last year on a secret mission he took, the journalist, didn't tell them where they were going. On the way back, there was an electrical problem in the plane that not all the electrical outlets were working. And one of the few outlets on the plane that was working was an outlet in the back where the reporters were. And they were taking turns charging their laptops on this electrical plug. And then some guys came, aides came from the front of the plane pushing them off because the plug was needed to recharge Dick Cheney's ipod. That is a true story. Queen Elizabeth has an ipod. The pope has an ipod. I can go on and on. I asked Steve Jobs recently. I got to interview him again when we did the excerpt for Newsweek. I said, do you worry about the ipod not being cool anymore? Because people like Dick Cheney and even Barbara Bush has an ipod. And he had a funny answer. He said, you know, do you not want to kiss someone because everyone has lips? But as it turns out, you know, there's something serious to it, because I think that music really does do provide an identity. And the ipod exposes, and also on itunes, too, exposes your music collection in a way that people actually can make judgments about you or find you attractive. Tony Fadell, who you'll meet in this book, he's one of the guys who helped make the ipod. He was the head of the hardware team. He once told a friend of his that he received this email from some college students thanking him for helping make the ipod because in the campus network they had a function where you could see People's iTunes Music Collection. And some female students had seen the music collections of some of these guys and contacted them after midnight for a hookup. Now, I was a little suspicious of this. It sounded. Had sort of the flavor of a geeky penthouse letter. But just this week, I got some academic papers from someone at the university of Oxford in england who actually has been doing studies to find how important music was in people finding other people. They did studies where they told people of opposite genders to get to know each other over the Internet. The first thing they would come to was asking about the music preferences. And he also did another study showing that people do have musical stereotypes depending on what music you listen to. And he said, I think the term was. There's a kernel of truth to what those stereotypes are. So identity to me in the age of ipod is really, like, a fascinating issue. And I get into that. And one thing I did, at the risk of embarrassing myself, and ultimately I did embarrass myself, was I wanted to do an ipod exchange with someone, basically to get into their heads by letting someone listen to my music on an ipod, and then I would listen to their music. And I did this with the ipod shuffle, which is the little device that was named after the shuffle function. And actually, that was kind of cool. This is a great Steve Job strategy. He wanted to introduce a low cost, and in order to do that, he'd have to get rid of some things like the screen and the scroll wheel. So instead of saying, well, here's a cheap ipod. It doesn't have these things, he said, this is the greatest thing ever. This is a shuffle machine. You could shuffle everything. And they even advertised it by saying, embrace uncertainty and life is random. So it was a way to go forward with that. And actually, in terms of randomness, Apple even addressed the whole random problem at one point by coming up with a feature called smart shuffle, which actually you can set how your artists would be clustered. And as Steve said, we're making it less random to make it feel more random. But I did this exchange. I actually met someone at a tech conference, at a food camp, actually, and we were talking, and it turns out she sounded like she had an interesting taste in music. So I had an ipod shuffle, and I said, here, let me fill this with my music, and let me know what you think. And I did that. And then she sent it back to me, and I filled it up. She filled it up with hers, and I sent it back. So listening to her music, it was really a strange experience. I actually felt that I was getting to know her that way. And she liked really odd stuff. There was sort of atonal music and a lot of jazz and some really freaky stuff. And the stuff I recognized, like there was some Amy Mann that I knew that I had. A lot of my collection were like islands that I could hold onto in that experience. And then she listened to mine, she sent it back and sent me an email. And I'll never forget it. She was being very tactful. I think that my taste in music, and especially since I got the ipod, I try to listen to a lot more music, new music, because I have time to listen to it. And it's fun to drop new stuff into a shuffle and say, hey, what's that? I put that on there. So I'm a baby boomer. But I sort of pride myself a little by staying a little recent. And she said, well, a lot of your music has lyrics on it, and a lot of it is sort of like structured. And I realized she was saying in sort of a nice way, this is like of the living room couch of music libraries. It's like baby boober comfort food. I sort of got exposed that way, but I learned about myself. Anyway, I want to make sure that there's time for questions. I could ask about answer about how the ipod came about or where music's going, or even the Zune, which I played with. But please give me the perfect questions and thanks for your attention. Okay, Scott, do you think that the video ipod should ever come about? The question is, will the video ipod when and if it comes about with a full screen? There's a rumor that the next ipod or coming soon ipod will have the whole screen, the whole front surface as a screen. And the wheel will be virtual. It'll be a touch thing, and you'll be able to manipulate it. When you touch it, the wheel will appear and you'll be able to touch it. Apparently Apple has a patent for that. If people are expecting something like that, of course, Apple will never tell us in advance what they're doing. I think that Jobs had it right. When the first ipod that did video, you'll notice it was never called the video. It was called the fifth generation iPod. When he said, look, this is a music device. The soul of the ipod is always going to be about music. And he did this when I asked him, well, you've been saying for years that people don't want to watch video in a small screen. Now you're introducing it. And he said, look, we'll see how it goes it's not a bad experience. And because so many people have music on their ipods and like listening to ipods, they'll try it out and we'll see how it works. I think this will be the same thing. People will be a little more likely to do video on a full screen version, but really not so much more than on the fifth generation iPod. They'll just make it a better experience. And I think there's a competitive aspect too because we've already seen Microsoft, Zune has a little bigger screen and there's going to be more video to watch, maybe even Google, Google video and YouTube video. I don't know. I understand you have a commonality on the board of Apple here, so maybe it'll be something from there. What effect did music iPad have on radio stations? I think the iPad actually has had a big effect on radio. The question is what effect does the ipod have on radio stations? And it's two ways. One is the podcast phenomenon, which I get into is really shaken up radio. The idea that basically radio is being shuffled now. And this popularity of podcasts has led to places like NPR podcasting virtually all their shows, which means that you're not bound to when you listen to it. The other thing that's affected radio on is that people now are able to get a huge variety in their listening habits and they're accustomed to that and they demand it. And radio, if you'll recall, in the past, really couple decades, has been narrowing its playlists because they measure everything down to the listener and they don't want to play one song that might turn off a listener. They limit their playlist to what they think most people want to hear. And really it's driving people away because people want to hear more songs. They want an ipod like experience. And actually a new format in radio, one of the few new formats in the past few years called Jack has emerged to be sort of like an ipod of the radio to compete with the ipod. But of course it doesn't play your song so it can't compete. But it is if you can't beat them, join them. School of competition. Yeah. How would you improve an ipod? The question is how would I improve an ipod? Well, that's a good question. Well, I make the drm. I make it interoperable. The first thing, one thing they did which was nice in the recent ipod is they made it easier to find songs there. I would think I would give a little more power to programming and playlisting on the go. One of my first complaints about this ipod is. It didn't have on the go playlisting and they added that. I would add some, some form of, you know, of wireless social networking Zune, you know, the Microsoft device is starting to go in that direction and I think that's a smart thing to do because, you know, to me the important thing about music now, the direction it's going is discovery. How do you find new music? And we've got this amazing connectivity we have which seems to lend itself to new kinds of music. And it seems to me the huge war in radio was that people were paying, bribing radio stations to play their music. And now it looks like record labels are going out of their way to protect the music. Why wouldn't they want us to hear music? Why wouldn't they want us to taste more new music? Why wouldn't they be happy if a wireless ipod or a Zune or whatever let us walk past the lamppost, slap the lamppost and get a new song? I think what I really want is ways to get free music. And maybe there'll be some kind of button saying that guy is a Bob Dylan fan, he's going to like this new artist and it just finds its way into my playlist should I choose to be open up to that. Yeah. Like you, I've had the opportunity of playing fusion and so when I was playing with it, I just, it wasn't fair for me. I'm just wondering what your experience was, interacting with it. It just didn't, I don't know how to explain. It didn't feel right. Yeah. So the question is when your experience will change. Johnson play with the Zune, it wasn't there for him. It doesn't have that. It doesn't pop out at you with the excitement of an ipod. And Microsoft doesn't expect it to really compete this year. The interesting thing is the wireless. I think this, they decided to do only one thing with the wireless this time around. They say in the future you'll go to a concert and they'll be able to beam everyone with a Zune. A song that sounds pretty good to me. But right now the only thing you can do with the wireless is send a song to someone else with a zoom. And the song, even if it's a Non copy protected mp3 or a podcast you're sending, gets an extra layer of protection. You can only listen to it three times or within three days, whichever comes first. Right. And that blows my mind. I mean, what if I'm saying, hey, I'm going on a Trip next week. Can you give me that? What's wrong with playing the song all you want for three days? Right? We're saying three times anytime, just for starters. I mean, what was both? And the reason why both is clearly is they had a tortured negotiation with record labels who said this is all we're going to have here. But they wound up with something that guarantees you're going to bump against the limitations there. Look, the reason why the itunes store was successful and what Jobs got the labels to do was to do a level of DRM that people didn't bump against it because it didn't seem designed by lawyers. The two things you don't want is a system which is designed by lawyers, that's bad because it's going to limit you there, or a system designed solely by engineers because it's going to be hard to use. You want a system that's designed by fans. Right? That's what I want. And really, when you talk to the people at Apple and ask them why the ipod is such a success, they'll say it's because we were designing something we wanted for ourselves. That's the same thing. I heard about the Macintosh and I certainly heard this with the ipod. They got more and more excited as this process went along because they wanted one themselves. And that was sort of the yardstick of what went in there, of course, along with Steve's really, really high bar of what's adequate. And that's why the ipod was so successful, I think. Yeah, Right. So why is the ipod. Pardon? Why is the ipod still the leader? Nothing close after five years. Other devices have you say better interfaces or maybe FM radios, other stuff in it. Well, only the ipod really works like an integrated system. It's a three legged stool there. There's the ipod and there's the software, the itunes software which lives on it. And there's the itunes store, which is actually part of itunes. People sort of miss this point about it is that you're not using a separate application, you're not going to a website. You're actually using part of that software. It's built in so tightly. And I think that makes a big difference in how easy it is to use and how built in it is. So it's really tough to assault that. Really tightly structured, I would argue in the interface. I don't see much better than the ipod and itunes. There are features that other devices have that ipod doesn't have. They routinely have FM radio built in, microphones, other kinds of stuff, but essentially the pure pleasure you get from the ipod exceeds these other things. And the people at Apple are shocked at this. One of them told me, you know, every Christmas we said, are they coming this year? Are they coming that year? But they wouldn't be there. You know, Apple would still have the market to itself. And I think that's going to be the case this year. So, yeah, back there. Okay. The question is, how are artists, or are artists altering the way they make music and the way they market music because of the ipod? I actually talked to a few artists when I did the book, and also during the course of researching the ipod. I think it's just starting to happen. In terms of the music, in terms of the marketing, we see it. You mentioned yourself, MySpace is a huge marketing advantage. And again, I think it's just starting. People are just waking up to the idea of building up their music through social networking. I think a more interesting part of your question is the music itself changing. And I was asking some people about that. I asked. One person I talked to was Jerry Harrison, who used to be in the Talking Heads and now is a producer up in Sausalito. And he says they. You can't make throwaway cuts anymore. It used to be on a cd. You would just fill up the CD with stuff. Now you can't assume that people are going to get the cd. You've got to do every cut better. And I think we're seeing also some cuts released sort of straight to itunes. And I think we'll see more live concerts. The Pearl Jam idea of getting live concerts out to people is a good idea. I think the more music, the better. And this is sort of a painless way to distribute it because obviously you don't have to press CDs and send them off to Walmart and then worry about getting them back. So I think we're just seeing the beginning of a lot of great things happening there. Yeah. Okay, last question. I've heard a lot of artists compliment they make a lot less money on itunes than they would, eliminating the pressure. The question is, artist profits aren't as high on the itunes store. And digital and all the stores, both these structures are the same as digital CDs. Right now, we're sort of on the low slope of the S curve of digital music. It's still in the single digits, I think, but it's getting higher in the single digits as a percentage. I think we're not too long away, just a couple years at most, to take that steep ascent up the S curve. And digital music is going to dominate Power Records is going out of business. That's a sign that something is amiss in the CD world. And I think that as that happens, maybe the next thing to go will be the royalty structures, which really don't help the artist too much and really are unrealistic. They're based on a previous model of distribution. So maybe the artists will do a lot better when they get a different royalty structure, which acknowledges that there's a different distribution structure. Anyway, thanks very much. Your questions were great, and it's just great to be here at Google News.