A couple weeks ago, I spoke to a colleague about using social media in the music industry, and was asked about the “democratization of the music industry.” I don’t know what that exactly means, or whether social media is the cause. What I do know is that the economy and the way that consumers choose their entertainment options have changed drastically over the last several years, and the number of creative people generating interesting, stimulating work has exploded. None of that would have been possible without Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs gave us the tools with which to create the social media bubble, and the power to create anything we can dream of. One tweet going around the internet right now says “For ten years, Steve Jobs was the smartest person in the music business, even though he wasn’t in the music business.” Apple’s innovation and the way they outpace all of their competitors has been at the core of our transformed economy and creation process. My Safari browser always loads their page first, and while I roll my eyes at some of the press releases posted, the stories about creative professionals using Apple tools to change the world always catch my attention.
It turns out that Steve and I have more in common than I realized. I haven’t given him much thought recently – I take my Apple products (just 1 laptop at the moment) for granted, and only really paid attention to him specifically when he was written up in some gossipy SF blog for eating at a passé restaurant or whatever. But The Washington Post’s headline about his passing included this summary of his life’s work: Jobs “designed computers for people who are more interested in what technology could do rather than how it was done.”
I have no idea what my computer does. I think at one point, my dad, who refurbished cast-off government computers for the local elementary schools and always had bits in our basement, explained how various pieces of some desktop computers worked, and maybe the name “Silicon Valley” might give me a clue about what is going on. But I don’t really think about it these days, because I don’t need to. I’m too busy creating stuff with the products that Steve put in my hands, and solving problems in a completely different space.
Twitter made it OK for me to lose my job. I am typing this sentence on my Apple laptop, using a web browser and applications that are optimized for Macs (let’s not forget the fact that Steve created his own vernacular). I can instantly access information that took hours to download when I was in high school. If Silicon Valley is where the Internet lives, there’s no doubt that Apple is the engine that drives it.
Apple’s case study is a lesson for everyone, regardless of your field, which is good, because sometimes classical musicians forget that they’re in the *business* of art. The core of the idea that people are more interested in what your product can do, rather than how it does so, is incredibly powerful – it’s the old “What do *I* get out of it?” message. I look forward to finding the next creative answer to that question in the classical music space, now that we are all empowered by our Apple gear and the tools they run.
A memorable Jobs quote on Twitter: ”It’s hard for customers to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.” That may be so, but we can start by observing what other things they like, and connecting the dots.
