In a new interview, Apple Music honcho Jimmy Iovine has blasted rivals Google, Spotify and Pandora. Iovine refers to employees of those companies as "culturally inept" tech geeks that don't really understand music.
Jimmy Iovine is the founder of Interscope records and one of the most influential and respected music business executives. He helped build and develop the careers of platinum-selling hip-hop artists Snoop Dog, Tupac Shakur and Eminem, along with more traditional rock and pop stars like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey. Along with hip-hop producer Dr. Dre, he also founded Beats by Dre, the company that was ultimately purchased last year by Apple and helped form the basis for the new Apple Music streaming service. Iovine further raised his public profile as a mentor on "American Idol" from 2011 through 2013.
Now, in a new interview, Iovine has slammed video game-playing tech geeks for ruining the music business. He claims that more recently, younger people have been exposed to music not through live shows but instead via video game soundtracks.
"If a kid doesn't grow up seeing a KISS concert or remembering the first moment he saw the Beatles, maybe he's going to remember something else," says Iovine, "like the first day he played f***** Mortal Kombat. Now those Mortal Kombat lovers have grown up, and some of them are working at companies like Google, Spotify, and Pandora. You know, the services you use to listen to music."
He calls those services "culturally inept" and laments the fact that while their technology-savvy employees are good at data distribution and number crunching, they don't really understand music's human connection. Iovine's plan to differentiate Apple Music from its competitors by focusing on the missing element of personal music taste and selection. That's why the service is offering curated playlists by top music tastemakers and Beats 1, an actual live radio station, as opposed to just computer-generated streaming via category or music genre, which is the mainstay of most other large streamers like Pandora and Spotify.
