New York Times obit... Steve Jobs Apple's visionary, dies at 56.
From Steve Jobs And Music: The Revolution Will Be Digitized "... The launch of the iTunes Store in 2003 took the traditional music-industry model and turned it completely on its head.
"For generations, a handful of major record labels had a lock on the distribution of music. They paid to have albums pressed, sent them to stores and dictated the prices. But after making a deal with Jobs to have their music appear on this new virtual platform, the labels quickly learned that they were now partners in their own game with a man whose vision for their business didn't always mesh with their own.... As of February 2010, the iTunes Store had sold 10 billion songs...."
In the early 2000s, the major record companies got together and tried to set up a digital distribution service. Eventually, 3 of the majors went off and set up one digital distribution service, and the other 3 majors set up a competing digital distribution service. They both had differing file formats and DRM, and neither was compatible with the other. They both bombed.
It took a technology company to create a successful digital distribution service, when the music industry seemed unable to embrace to the new digital environment in any meaningful way. Certainly not in a way that music fans wanted.
From Billboard: Steve Jobs 1955-2011: The Father of Digital Music, and His Legacy. "... According to former Apple employees, Jobs' involvement in the music industry was a labor of love. He was personally involved in not only creating the iTunes digital retail system itself, but also in acquiring the music catalog he himself wanted to hear and make available on it.
The most high-profile example is his success in ending the Beatles' longstanding digital embargo, but there were many more such cases of his personal involvement earlier on in the process. He personally convinced Dr. Dre. to make his catalog available digitally. He negotiated directly with Bono, Jimmy Iovine and manager Paul McGuinness at his kitchen table for the U2 iPod in 2004 ... Apple's TV ads remain one of the all-time greatest platforms for music exposure...."
Local band Steriogram can attest to that value of gaining exposure from having their music in an iPod ad. It may be fair to say that was the pinnacle of their career to date. I recall them casually mentioning in an interview that they had Steve Jobs' phone number, following their song Walkie Talkie Man being picked by him for the iPod ad...
The band talk about how the ad happened "...We managed to get Steve Jobs' fax number through a friend of ours, back in the old days of fax we sent him a little note telling him who we were and that we just signed a deal to Capitol Records in the US from a video we made on iMovie. The note just said thank you. Two weeks later the phone rang and it was Steve himself saying thanks for the note and that he would keep an eye on us and help us out if he could. He then started mentioned it in his key note speeches which led to it being on the iPod ad." From Menu, Nov 2010.
ADDED From LA Times...Steve Jobs revolutionized the music industry
"... Stevie Wonder said Thursday that he sought Jobs out late in his life to express his gratitude for matters that went well beyond what he and his company did for music.
"The one thing people aren't talking about is how he has made his technology accessible to the blind and the deaf and people who are quadriplegics and paraplegics," Wonder, 61, said. "He has affected not just my world, but the world of millions of people who without that technology would not be able to discover the world.
"His company was the first to come up with technology that made it accessible without screaming out loud 'This is for the blind; This is for the deaf.' He made it part of the actual unit itself. There was application inside the technology that allowed you to use it or not use it..."
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