Steve Jobs: Recording Companies Need To Be Educated

How did Apple get recording companies to buy in to the iTunes download store? “We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They’re going to want to buy downloads. They didn’t see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying, ‘No, we want that — we want a subscription business’.”