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Beats CEO spent three years trying to convince Steve Jobs to launch streaming music service

Beats CEO spent three years trying to convince Steve Jobs to launch streaming music service

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Jimmy Iovine, CEO of Beats Audio, formally announced his new Project Daisy streaming music service today and gave an interview with All Things D. In it, he talked about his relationship with Apple over the years — while at Interscope, Iovine worked with Steve Jobs during 2002 and 2003, saying that "we were really close. We did some great marketing stuff together." However, Iovine quickly began to realize that music was going to move toward streaming and tried his best to bring Jobs along. "I was always trying to push Steve into subscription. And he wasn't keen on it right away," Iovine said. "[Beats co-founder] Luke Wood and I spent about three years trying to talk him into it." Obviously, that still hasn't happened, despite recent rumors that Apple will introduce its own streaming service this winter, and it appears that pricing concerns were an ongoing issue for Jobs. "He didn't want to pay the record companies enough," said Iovine. "He felt that they would come down, eventually."

In the meantime, Iovine is happy to press ahead with his streaming services Mog and the forthcoming Daisy. He seems pretty convinced that big tech companies aren't the right companies to tackle streaming services, despite Apple's mastery of the music industry over the last decade. Companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are different, Iovine believes. "Those [sites] program themselves. Subscription needs a programmer. It needs culture," Iovine said. "And tech guys can't do that. They don't even know who to hire. They're utilities." We feel like Iovine might be selling his potential competitors a little short, but he may have a point — the most successful streaming services have been created by upstarts, not entrenched companies.