Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For that to happen, the Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of their songs, had to negotiate their own differences over how to handle the digital rights. “The Beatles all want to be on iTunes,” Jobs later recalled, “but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can’t get divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes was something I very much hoped I would live to resolve.” As it turned out, he would.
Bono
Bono, the lead singer of U2, deeply appreciated
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Apple’s marketing muscle. He was confident that his Dublin-based band was still the best in the world, but in 2004 it was trying, after almost thirty years together, to reinvigorate its image. It had produced an exciting new album with a song that the band’s lead guitarist, The Edge, declared to be “the mother of all rock tunes.”
Bono knew he needed to find a way to get it some traction, so he placed a call to Jobs.
“I wanted something specific from Apple,” Bono recalled. “We had a song called ‘Vertigo’ that featured an aggressive guitar riff that I knew would be contagious, but only if people were exposed to it many, many times.” He was worried that the era of promoting a song through airplay on the radio was over. So Bono visited Jobs at home in Palo Alto, walked around the garden, and made an unusual pitch. Over the years U2
had spurned offers as high as $23 million to be in commercials. Now he wanted Jobs to use the band in an iPod commercial for free—or at least as part of a mutually beneficial package. “They had never done a commercial before,” Jobs later recalled. “But they were getting ripped off by free downloading, they liked what we were doing with iTunes, and they thought we could promote them to a younger audience.”
Any other CEO would have jumped into a mosh pit to have U2 in an ad, but Jobs pushed back a bit. Apple didn’t feature recognizable people in the iPod ads, just silhouettes. (The Dylan ad had not yet been made.)
“You have silhouettes of fans,” Bono replied, “so couldn’t the next phase be silhouettes of artists?” Jobs said it sounded like an idea worth exploring. Bono left a copy of the unreleased album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, for Jobs to hear. “He was the only person outside the band who had it,” Bono said.
A round of meetings ensued. Jobs flew down to talk to Jimmy Iovine, whose Interscope records
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distributed U2, at his house in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. The Edge was there, along with U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness. Another meeting took place in Jobs’s kitchen, with McGuinness writing down the deal points in the back of his diary. U2 would appear in the commercial, and Apple would vigorously promote the album in multiple venues, ranging from billboards to the iTunes homepage. The band would get no direct fee, but it would get royalties from the sale of a special U2 edition of the iPod. Bono believed, like Lack, that the musicians should get a royalty on each iPod sold, and this was his small attempt to assert the principle in a limited way for his band. “Bono and I asked Steve to make us a black one,” Iovine recalled.
“We weren’t just doing a commercial sponsorship, we were making a co-branding deal.”
“We wanted our own iPod, something distinct from the regular white ones,” Bono recalled. “We wanted black, but Steve said, ‘We’ve tried other colors than white, and they don’t work.’” A few days later Jobs relented and accepted the idea, tentatively.
The commercial interspersed high-voltage shots of the band in partial silhouette with the usual silhouette of a dancing woman listening to an iPod. But even as it was being shot in London, the agreement with Apple was unraveling. Jobs began having second thoughts about the idea of a special black iPod, and the royalty rates were not fully pinned down. He called James Vincent, at Apple’s ad agency, and told him to call London and put things on hold. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Jobs said. “They don’t realize how much value we are giving them, it’s going south. Let’s think of some other ad to do.” Vincent, a lifelong U2 fan, knew how big the ad would be, both for the band and Apple, and begged for the chance to call Bono to try to get things on track. Jobs gave him Bono’s mobile number,
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and he reached the singer in his kitchen in Dublin.
Bono was also having a few second thoughts. “I don’t think this is going to work,” he told Vincent. “The band is reluctant.” Vincent asked what the problem was.
“When we were teenagers in Dublin, we said we would never do naff stuff,” Bono replied. Vincent, despite being British and familiar with rock slang, said he didn’t know what that meant. “Doing rubbishy things for money,” Bono explained. “We are all about our fans.
We feel like we’d be letting them down if we went in an ad. It doesn’t feel right. I’m sorry we wasted your time.”
Vincent asked what more Apple could do to make it work. “We are giving you the most important thing we have to give, and that’s our music,” said Bono. “And what are you giving us back? Advertising, and our fans will think it’s for you. We need something more.” Vincent replied that the offer of the special U2 edition of the iPod and the royalty arrangement was a huge deal.
“That’s the most prized thing we have to give,” he told Bono.
The singer said he was ready to try to put the deal back together, so Vincent immediately called Jony Ive, another big U2 fan (he had first seen them in concert in Newcastle in 1983), and described the situation. Then he called Jobs and suggested he send Ive to Dublin to show what the black iPod would look like. Jobs agreed.
Vincent called Bono back, and asked if he knew Jony Ive, unaware that they had met before and admired each other. “Know Jony Ive?” Bono laughed. “I love that guy. I drink his bathwater.”
“That’s a bit strong,” Vincent replied, “but how about letting him come visit and show how cool your iPod would be?”
“I’m going to pick him up myself in my Maserati,”
Bono answered. “He’s going to stay at my house, I’m going to take him out, and I will get him really drunk.”
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The next day, as Ive headed toward Dublin, Vincent had to fend off Jobs, who was still having second thoughts. “I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing,” he said. “We don’t want to do this for anyone else.” He was worried about setting the precedent of artists getting a royalty from each iPod sold. Vincent assured him that the U2 deal would be special.
“Jony arrived in Dublin and I put him up at my guest house, a serene place over a railway track with a view of the sea,” Bono recalled. “He shows me this beautiful black iPod with a deep red click wheel, and I say okay, we’ll do it.” They went to a local pub, hashed out some of the details, and then called Jobs in Cupertino to see if he would agree. Jobs haggled for a while over each detail of the finances, and over the design, before he finally embraced the deal. That impressed Bono. “It’s actually amazing that a CEO
cares that much about detail,” he said. When it was resolved, Ive and Bono settled into some serious drinking. Both are comfortable in pubs. After a few pints, they decided to call Vincent back in California. He was not home, so Bono left a message on his answering machine, which Vincent made sure never to erase. “I’m sitting here in bubbling Dublin with your friend Jony,” it said. “We’re both a bit drunk, and we’re happy with this wonderful iPod and I can’t even believe it exists and I’m holding it in my hand. Thank you!”
Jobs rented a theater in San Jose for the unveiling of the TV commercial and special iPod. Bono and The Edge joined him onstage. The album sold 840,000
copies in its first week and debuted at number one on the Billboard chart. Bono told the press afterward that he had done the commercial without charge because
“U2 will get as much value out of the commercial as Apple will.” Jimmy Iovine added that it would allow the band to “reach a younger audience.”
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What was remarkable was that associating with a computer and electronics company was the best way for a rock band to seem hip and appeal to young people. Bono later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil. “Let’s have a look,” he told Greg Kot, the Chicago Tribune music critic. “The ‘devil’ here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That’s the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”
Bono got Jobs to do another deal with him in 2006, this one for his Product Red campaign that raised money and awareness to fight AIDS in Africa. Jobs was never much interested in philanthropy, but he agreed to do a special red iPod as part of Bono’s campaign. It was not a wholehearted commitment. He balked, for example, at using the campaign’s signature treatment of putting the name of the company in parentheses with the word “red” in superscript after it, as in (APPLE)RED.
“I don’t want Apple in parentheses,” Jobs insisted. Bono replied, “But Steve, that’s how we show unity for our cause.” The conversation got heated—to the F-you stage—before they agreed to sleep on it. Finally Jobs compromised, sort of. Bono could do what he wanted in his ads, but Jobs would never put Apple in parentheses on any of his products or in any of his stores. The iPod was labeled (PRODUCT)RED, not (APPLE)RED.
“Steve can be sparky,” Bono recalled, “but those moments have made us closer friends, because there are not many people in your life where you can have those robust discussions. He’s very opinionated. After our shows, I talk to him and he’s always got an opinion.”
