Kanye West, in an interview with Bloomberg, took a moment to fill everyone in on the inner workings of Apple, the iTunes Festival, and Apple’s acquisition of Beats, which shouldn’t exactly be unexpected for man who calls himself another ‘Steve Jobs’.
The interview, which is in video format, can be found here. It’s about 5 minutes long, but it’s worth the watch. It’s full of doozies.
If you can’t watch it, here’s some point form notes on what he says:
- Apple rewards artists promotional iTunes spots in exchange for iTunes Festival appearances
- Apple only fully realized the value of Beats because of the Jay-Z deal with Samsung
- The best thing about the “fall” of BlackBerry? The “rise of Apple” and win for “creativity”
I’m not sure how I feel about the value and kind exchange of performances at the iTunes Festival for promotion on iTunes. I guess, when it comes down to it, the extra promotional space on iTunes “could” “probably” makes an artist more than the price of payment for a gig.
That said, having done my fair share of creative work in the past, this sounds an awful lot like spec work. I guess when you’re Apple and you have a giant online store where everyone and their brother buys music you can do this sort of thing without creatives losing their shit on you.
