immy Iovine has a line he likes to use. Actually he has a lot of them. Today, Iovine runs Apple Music, the latest stop in a career that has taken him from studio rat to cofounder of Interscope Records to head of Beats Electronics. But he is also a longshoreman’s son from Red Hook, Brooklyn, and he has inherited his native borough’s brand of salty raconteurism. Over the years he’s assembled a playlist of zingers to describe, for instance, his philosophy for dealing with prima donna artists (“If the shit gets bigger than the cat, out goes the cat”) or his appeal to Dr. Dre to build headphones with him instead of designing an athletic shoe (“Fuck sneakers—let’s make speakers”).
But the line I’m talking about is the one he uses to describe his life’s ambition: “All I’ve ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture.” It sounds almost modest, the way he says it. Don’t be fooled. Some music executives want to help talented artists reach their natural audience, no matter how small. Iovine is not among them. He’s after the kind of massive flash points that unite populations around the world and change not just what they listen to but how they dress and move and behave and think and live. “He finds one great idea, gets rid of everything else, and chases it to the end of the earth until it’s everywhere,” says Luke Wood, president of Beats Electronics.
By his count, Iovine has pulled this off four times over the past couple of decades by (1) introducing the world to Snoop Dogg, Tupac, and Chronic-era Dr. Dre, (2) shepherding the careers of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, (3) giving Eminem his start, and (4) creating Beats, the hardware company that turned headphones into a fashion accessory and today accounts for 34 percent of US stereo headphone sales.
Subscribe to WIRED Photo by: Joe Pugliese
Iovine accomplished this by deftly operating the machinery of mass culture. When radio stations refused to broadcast “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” the first single from The Chronic, Iovine bought 60-second ad spots and played snippets of the song during drive time so radio programmers would hear it during their commute. He got Snoop and Dre on the cover of Rolling Stone by convincing editor Jann Wenner that they were the second coming of Mick and Keith. He wheedled the video onto MTV’s prime time, where gangsta rap had never previously appeared. The album probably would have been a hit anyway, but those three factors turned it into an international phenomenon. “It was huge,” Dr. Dre says. “It brought so much more attention to what I was doing.”
Welp, the machinery of mass culture ain’t what it used to be. MTV abandoned music videos when they became YouTube fodder, radio stations in the post-Clear Channel era would rather play the music of revenue-maximizing common denominators than edgy new pop acts, and magazines … uh, that’s a touchy subject. That decline has occurred even as the Internet has placed the entire history of recorded music at our fingertips, leaving us with access to a universe of songs but without the tools to forge them into shared, generation-defining phenomena. We still have pop stars, but fewer and fewer of them have achieved the grandest pop ambition, as described by critic Greil Marcus: “to remake America on his or her own terms.”
Then again, in a world where billions of people can communicate instantly around the globe and an app can reach millions of customers overnight, maybe we don’t need music to change the world. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that standout technologists are referred to as “rock stars”—they’re providing the sense of connection and awe that their musical forebears once did. Teenagers used to fantasize about becoming the next Jimmy Page; now they dream of becoming the next Larry Page. They wax nostalgic about the first time they used Snapchat, not the first time they heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
“If you tell a kid, ‘You’ve got to pick music or Instagram,’ they’re not picking music,” Iovine says. “There was a time when, for anybody between the ages of 15 and 25, music was one, two, and three. It’s not anymore.”
ne afternoon in June, Iovine was in his office at Beats headquarters in Culver City, California, catching up with some former colleagues from Interscope. It had been a year since Apple acquired Beats. The décor, at least, required little adjustment—its notes of blond wood, polished silver lighting, and white laminate were reminiscent of an Apple store, though one strewn with the occasional copy of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and an Art Basel catalog.
Iovine’s office was packed with memorabilia, like a single-serving Hard Rock Cafe. John Lennon’s Mellotron rested in a corner, beneath a framed handwritten letter from Tupac and a signed Patti Smith poster. At the opposite corner sat Iovine and his pals, on a speakerphone call with Sony Music chief Doug Morris, their old boss at Universal Music. As I entered, Iovine was shouting into the speaker. “No, no, they’re here!” he was saying of his guests. “They came up here! The lunch is better!”
“He has more money than us!” chipped in one of the lunch companions. Looking at him I felt a subconscious stirring, as if we’d met before. I later realized this was Steve Berman, Interscope’s vice chair, who portrayed a weaselly record executive in Dr. Dre’s “Dre Day” video, which I probably watched at least 100 times when I was in college.
Iovine looked like a trimmer version of Pablo Picasso. He wore rimless glasses and a blue suede jacket over a red printed T-shirt. His teeth looked excellent. He laughed generously and, like a lot of people in the entertainment industry, peppered his speech with expressions of enthusiasm—“fabulous,” “beautiful,” “I’d love that.” He was, and I say this with sincere admiration, a charming motherfucker.
That trait has served Iovine well throughout his career, which has been marked by his ability to deal profitably with difficult personalities—John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Suge Knight, Eminem, Steve Jobs. Iovine met Jobs in 2002, while making the rounds of various tech executive suites, trying to impress upon them the dangers that Napster, Kazaa, and the other file-sharing services posed to the music business. He was beginning to despair that the labels wouldn’t come up with a solution—their plans mostly boiled down to “lawyer up.” But his interactions with the tech world didn’t leave him any more optimistic. The response from Intel’s Les Valdez, as Iovine recalls it, was particularly rattling: “Not every industry was made to last forever.”
Iovine could sense that Jobs was different—a technologist who was not only obsessed with music but who cared about making a cultural impact. “I knew in the first two seconds,” Iovine says. “People say, ‘Oh, I like music.’ No kidding. You also like spaghetti and meatballs, but you’re not a chef. Just because you like something, that doesn’t mean that you have a feel for it. Steve did. He understood what popular culture was, and how to move it.”
At the time, Jobs was trying to convince record labels to sign on with iTunes—a proposal that meant unbundling albums and selling singles for 99 cents. Iovine became a critical ally. “Jimmy was probably the most important record figure at that time,” Sony’s Morris says. “People watched closely, because he was normally on the right track.”
What’s not debatable is Beats’ popularity. Like the iPod, its success owes as much to design and marketing as to tech specs. As with The Chronic, Iovine and his partners waged a scorched-earth campaign across the media landscape, methodically hacking Beats into the public consciousness and dropping culture-jamming hints at every opportunity. They signed up a network of high-profile endorsements—including LeBron James, Richard Sherman, and Nicki Minaj. Will.i.am, to whom Iovine granted an ownership stake, wore a nonworking prototype around his neck during an interview with Larry King and wormed a reference into the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.” Morris says that Iovine agreed to serve as a mentor on American Idol largely because he thought it would be good exposure for the company. “He wouldn’t have done it unless he could get the people to wear Beats,” he says.
Iovine’s techie rivals didn’t have quite the same knack. When the NFL, which is sponsored by Bose, insisted that football players stop wearing Beats headphones on camera, the players responded by placing electrical tape over the logo, which only drew further attention and gave them the invaluable patina of rebellion.1 “I can’t believe I’m this lucky,” Iovine said in response to the ban. “I feel like sending them the tape.”
Iovine now says that he founded Beats with the hope of getting acquired by Apple. By this point, he was speaking on the phone regularly with Jobs and also with Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue. In the meantime, noticing that Apple was falling behind Spotify and Rdio in the burgeoning music-streaming wars, he launched his own streaming offering, called Beats Music. This wasn’t just a cynical ploy; Iovine had advocated for streaming music for more than a decade. It also wasn’t his first attempt to build a digital music business. In 1999 he founded Farm Club, a short-lived venture in which artists posted songs to a website, the best of which would be showcased on a TV show. With Beats, Iovine doubled down on the idea of expert curation, assembling a team of music-industry veterans to custom-build playlists to guide listeners through the chaos of an unbridled music catalog. Beats Music never really took off—just over 300,000 subscribers signed up—but it accomplished its primary goal. On May 28, 2014, Apple announced it was purchasing the entire company for $3 billion and bringing Iovine and Dre aboard.
n the fourth floor of the Ronald Tutor Campus Center at USC, the future of the music industry isn’t just a question of commerce or culture—it’s a homework assignment. This is the home of the Iovine and Young Academy, and it’s here that students like Matt Stern, a member of the academy’s maiden class, is charged with working on such intractable problems. You can see why his professors would think he might be up to the task. Stern has led a $10,000 campaign to build schools in Africa and plays music under the name DJSterntables. His classmates are similarly impressive. Montana Reed runs one business that creates outdoor furniture from found materials and another that provides home repair and maintenance. Arjun Mehta cofounded Stoodle.org (acquired by the CK-12 Foundation) and PlaySpan (acquired by Visa). Caitlin Tran has done consulting work for Best Buddies, an international nonprofit, and this summer she interned at Autodesk. While they all take different classes across the USC campus, the core of the program revolves around group projects. Every two weeks they’re presented with a new challenge, break up into small teams, and design a presentation. Over the course of the year, they came up with ideas for new wearable medical devices, a comprehensive plan to incorporate skateboarding across the USC campus, and methods of digitizing precious cultural artifacts.
But for their first assignment they were tasked with imagining how music would be experienced 10 years in the future. The group’s presentations included such notions as wireless earbuds that allowed for collaborative listening, synchronized album-release parties, and a platform that would let artists A/B-test their albums. Some students also suggested a marketplace where musicians could interact directly with fans—a feature not unlike Apple Music’s new Connect platform. “We were joking during Jimmy’s keynote, ‘When is he going to thank the Iovine and Young Academy?’” Stern says. “You could see a lot of parallels in there.”
Iovine was inspired to create the academy after concluding that most college graduates emerge from school with their interests and expertise unhelpfully narrowed. “We tried to hire people for Beats, and they were either engineers or music people,” Iovine says. “I’m like, this is all wrong. Of course the guys that run Beats understand both. Trent Reznor understands both. Will.i.am understands both. Those are the kind of people I was looking for, and there just aren’t enough of them.”
A classical-music conductor and composer, Erica Muhl oversees the Iovine and Young Academy at USC. Photo by: Joe Pugliese
Iovine began scouting for a school that would support a new kind of program and quickly settled on USC, especially when he got connected with Erica Muhl, whom Iovine calls “a fucking miracle.” Muhl, a classical-music composer and conductor who runs USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, helped create an ambitious new curriculum, pulling together faculty and advisers from the engineering, business, and arts schools, establishing a four-year trajectory that includes seminars with celebrity guests like film producer Eric Eisner, financier Paul Wachter, and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel (as well as WIRED editor in chief Scott Dadich). By the end, many students will have set up their own businesses or nonprofits.
Although the music industry’s travails may have inspired the academy, the overarching goal is broader—to teach students marketable tech skills while encouraging them to explore their creativity. A quick perusal of the Garage, a circular classroom-cum-makerspace that serves as the academy’s student headquarters, suggests that it’s working. Students proudly point out their class projects, like a cardboard prototype of a mobile printer. They lead me past videoscreen-dotted workstations, where they hone their editing skills, and show off the 3-D printers, laser cutters, and hacksaws that populate the various work spaces and labs. The whole thing has the air of an extremely well-funded Montessori school, which Muhl says is no accident. When her son was in fourth grade, he attended a school that promoted interdisciplinary thinking by arranging classrooms around a central pod, so that students could look at subjects from different perspectives—an arrangement you can also find at the new Apple headquarters or at the Pixar offices in Emeryville, California.
“The thing that struck me was the energy of the place,” Spiegel told me in an email, adding that on the day of his visit the students were racing hand-built watercraft. “Jimmy and Dre have created a place that celebrates both thinking and doing, married with tons of excitement and creativity.”
Iovine says he’s just doing what he’s always done, following his sense of where the culture is headed. “One of the things he told me very early was ‘There’s a new kid out there,’” Muhl says—a generation that grew up with technology as a cultural product, that doesn’t draw rigid lines between art and engineering. He certainly seems to have tapped into something: This year more than 300 students applied for 22 spots, and Muhl says students have turned down offers from Ivy League schools to attend the academy. Muhl says the program’s success depends not just on providing a great education but on picking the right students in the first place. In that way, it’s kind of like a record label. “Jimmy collects creative minds,” Will.i.am says. “Why would he have a school with coders, designers, and developers? I think that’s his version of always smelling what’s coming next. Because it won’t just be someone writing a song.”