Jimmy Iovine says he's staying at Apple, rumors 'had nothing to do with reality'

Industry big shot and Apple Music head Jimmy Iovine reiterated his commitment to the company on Monday, saying he's "loyal to the guys at Apple" and has no plans to leave.

"I am committed to doing whatever Eddy [Cue], Tim [Cook] and Apple need me to do, to help wherever and however I can, to take this all the way," Iovine told Variety. "I am in the band."

Iovine was responding to reports that he would move on from Apple in August after stock options said to be worth nearly $1 billion were fully vested.

"There is a tiny portion of stock that vests in August, but that's not what I think about," he said. "My contract is up in August, but the funny thing is, I don't have a contract. I have a deal, and certain things happen along that deal. The bottom line is I'm loyal to the guys at Apple. I love Apple, and I really love musicians. That's why those articles annoyed me, because it had nothing to do with reality. It made it out to be all about money."

Apple Music continues to experience significant growth under the direction of Iovine, Cue, and content head Larry Jackson. The service now has more than 30 million subscribers, and Iovine expects that trajectory to continue with new exclusive content initiatives.

"The next chapter, whatever intensity I'm working, will be to help streaming come to scale," he said, pointing to a Netflix-like model:

"Netflix has a unique catalog, because they don't buy HBO and they have their own catalog. Then on top of that they have a little thing called $6 billion in original content. HBO has $3 billion, Amazon probably has $4 billion. Well, guess how much original content streaming has: zero! Fundamentally. All the catalogs are exactly the same."

While reports have said Apple is preparing to spend more than $1 billion on original video content, it's not known if or how much the company would shell out for similar music deals.

15 Comments

lostkiwi 640 comments · 18 Years

About 6 years ago

Glad to hear it, Jimmy.
I love AppleMusic, sure it’s not perfect but I prefer it to Spotify.

applesnoranges 50 comments · 9 Years

You da man Jimmy 😎

Rayz2016 6957 comments · 8 Years

Has a post been removed from this thread?

Here’s what I said when this nonsense first broke:

Mmmm.

So no one has actually said he’s leaving; they’re guessing he’ll leave because his shares are ripe.

That’s journalism for you.

Still, if he and Dre (is Dre still in the building) leave then I don’t think it’s a huge deal.

Didn’t this figure as a possibility to anyone at AI?

When AI repeated the statement of an unknown blogger who claimed that Apple hadn’t designed the Chicago store to account for the weather, I said:

So while I think it's possible that the architects and/or engineers didn't account for something, I think its unlikely that they didn't account for the weather conditions in Chicago.
So what else could have gone wrong? Not sure. It could be that the store is a lot warmer than they thought it would, possibly because they didn't account for the amount of foot traffic in cold weather. It could be that the there's not enough insulation in the roof to prevent it heating up so fast. The point is, just saying the problem is snow is not really helpful.
And I just reckon that saying the architects didn't account for snow is a bit naive.

Of course, we won’t know until June whether or not Apple is going to allow iOS apps to run natively on MacOS as AI claimed they would, so we’ll just have to wait and see for that one.

The point is that there seems to less actual journalism going on than actual copying news from other sites and slapping them on the front page without any investigation or critical thinking. In some cases, this lack of critical thinking could be leading to stories being inaccurately interpreted. In my less than humble opinion, this has gotten much worse lately. This is a shame because when you put the work in then the results are very very good: the FaceID tests, the iMac Pro looksee, the reporting on Apple’s root access bug snafu are a few examples that I’d like to see more of.

ksec 1502 comments · 18 Years

Strange Report, and strange with the words he use to say it.