Jimmy Iovine Talks Apple Music, Taylor Swift's Letter, Hiring Zane Lowe, More

Apple Music head Jimmy Iovine talks about new streaming service, Taylor Swift's letter, the hiring of Zane Lowe, and more in an interview with the Evening Standard.

After Swift posted an open letter to Apple expressing concern over artists not getting paid during the three month free trial period, Iovine got a call from SVP Eddy Cue.

“Eddy [Cue, Apple senior VP] woke up on Sunday morning,” says Iovine. “He called me and said, ‘This is a drag’. I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe there’s some stuff she doesn’t understand’. He said, ‘Why don’t you give Scott [Borchetta, Swift’s label boss] a call? I called Scott, I called Eddy back, Eddy and Tim [Cook, Apple CEO] called me back and we said, ‘Hey, you know what, we want this system to be right and we want artists to be comfortable, let’s do it’.”


Iovine also addresses competition in the streaming music sector.

“There’s a lot of [them],” he says, disdainfully. “Music deserves elegance and the distribution right now is not great. It’s all over the place and there are a bunch of utilities. That’s the best you can find. It’s basically a really narrow, small, inelegant way to have music delivered. So it’s sterile, programmed by algorithms and numbing.”

Apple's solution to improve recommendations is to use human input. “Algorithms don’t understand the subtlety and the mixing of genres. So we hired the best people we know. Hired hundreds of them.”

One of Apple Music's best people is Zane Lowe, who was poached from BBC to run Beats 1.


“What he’s done in 19 weeks shouldn’t have been possible,” says Iovine. Was it easy to convince Lowe to leave London? “It wasn’t easy but that was my job and I come from a world of knowing when someone is special.”

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