Jimmy Iovine, Interscope Records & Beats by Dre

**David Senra** (0:02)
I want to start with what you were just saying before we started recording. I was like, Rob, hurry up and run the tape. You said we live in a corny world.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:09)
We've gone from fame replacing great, right? So it became more important at one point to be famous than to be great, because there's a currency. You had to be great at one time to get a record deal, to do all that stuff, and then that sort of dwindled as time went on, which is just fine. But it has absolutely replaced great. And what you can do on the Internet and market yourself and all this other stuff, because you can make a lot of money just being famous. But now, it's taken another leap, which is fascinating. It's gone to attention. And sometimes that leads or contributes to a very corny world.
I think social media has the biggest impact that I've seen in my lifetime, you know.

**David Senra** (1:01)
And that contributes to people being corny for attention on social media, you think?

**Jimmy Iovine** (1:03)
Yeah. Well, because you can make money. And the people that don't need money want attention. And they want to be the top of the news or the viral or, you know, most of my friends, if they go viral, they're devastated. Do you know what I'm saying? They're like, oh shit, well, they don't even know.

**David Senra** (1:24)
I think not even knowing would be the place that I would aspire to be in. Like, I want to make great work. Obviously, I'm public facing because I happen to be a self-help podcast. I want to make some of the best podcasts in the world. But I try to just, I mean, it comes from you. I did this video. I obviously did the Founders episode on you because you've been one of the people I most admire for a long period of time. And you have, we did this clip that got almost like two million views of your advice about, you know, why do horses have blinders on them?
It's one of my favorite things. Every time I post it, it still like resonates. And I post things to remind myself where it's like, hey, I'm chasing after greatness, right? And it doesn't matter. I can't look left and I can't look right and worry about what other people are doing. This is one of the things I most admire about you. We spent a few hours together at your house yesterday. You were very kind to invite me over there again. And you pulled up this insane video from you from 2004, which is four or five years before Spotify was founded. And you essentially were talking about what you saw as the technological shift happening in the music industry. What was that video about?

**Jimmy Iovine** (2:26)
I always wanted Interscope to move laterally. I didn't want to keep drilling the same hole. I hate drilling the same hole. That's just me. I get bored drilling the same hole. That's kind of why I've jumped around industries a little bit and got to learn on the fly a lot. But that was about around 2000 We had this little TV show called Jimmy and Doug's Farm Club. It was about uploading your music to Interscope and we would put you on our TV show. It was fantastic and it worked. What I really wanted to do was have a music streaming service of all you can eat.

**David Senra** (3:07)
But this was before it was invented. You were talking about the ideal situation before it was actually founded.

**Jimmy Iovine** (3:14)
I see online all the time people talk about shit before it happens. You know what I mean? But that's 10 percent of the game. The game is getting it right. MySpace was ahead of its time, but it lost the race. So I was very fortunate to be at least early enough to have Apple Music get on the board. I had Beats Music and it went to Apple Music. So at least we became number two. Daniel, who is extraordinary, had the wherewithal and the ability to get the licenses from a record business that didn't understand all what he was talking about, the fact that he wrestled those licenses out. It's so odd. I mean, you can prove it because if you look at those deals, those deals are reflective of the iTunes download market. 70-30, that was the same business as the download market. So they just copied that, which is not a great bit model for that. Why? Because you have not enough money in the streaming service in order for it to really live. So they got to now go out and find different versions of revenue, right? And they pay 70% or whatever it is now, 72%, 70-60%. I don't know what the negotiations have been since then. And structure in a really odd way, because let's say, for example, you're married, you have two kids, and you have a family plan. And you and your wife play the clash, the police, et cetera. But your kids play Drake and Kendrick Lamar all day. Most of the money from your house goes to Drake and Kendrick Lamar. What you're hearing about is that the artists are like, they used to be able to earn a living like that. But now, unless you're in that top chunk of heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy streaming, the money is not really meaningful.