Apple exec Jimmy Iovine is sticking to his script when it comes to Apple Music rivals like Spotify: they’re “utilities”. As Evening Standard journalist Jimi Famurewa noted in an interview with Iovine published yesterday: “If I did a shot every time Iovine said ‘utilities’ I’d have been carried from the room.” For example: “Music deserves elegance and the distribution right now is not great.
It’s all over the place and there are a bunch of utilities,” said Iovine. “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… Algorithms don’t understand the subtlety and the mixing of genres. So we hired the best people we know. Hired hundreds of them.” With Spotify having been building out its editorial team and human-curated playlists for years – and other rivals following suit – we’re surprised they haven’t challenged the Apple Music rhetoric more often publicly.
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