In a 10-minute presentation on April 28, 2003, Steve Jobs reinvented the music industry and persuaded millions of music lovers to pay 99 cents a song.
Ten years ago Apple launched the iTunes Music Store and completely changed how we acquire and enjoy our music. For 99 cents per song users could choose from 200,000 tracks. More than one million songs were sold in the first week. Today, after 25 billion downloads, the Apple iTunes Music Store is the largest music retailer on the planet.
Steve Jobs revolutionized the music industry by doing something quite extraordinary: he persuaded millions of music lovers that it was a good idea to pay for something many of them were getting for free on peer-to-peer filing sharing programs. Although the programs themselves (Napster, Kazaa, Limewire) were legal, the free sharing and downloading of music on the platforms was not.
Jobs’ performance demonstrated the power of an effective presentation to change a mindset. He introduced the music store at the end of a longer “special event” presentation about iTunes. The relevant 10-minute section the presentation is an excellent example of how to announce a new product or service that challenges conventional thinking.
Jobs was a master of introducing villains and heroes in his presentations and they appeared in that order. The villain appeared first—a problem in need of a solution. The hero followed—an Apple product.
Jobs began with a brief discussion of Napster and Kazaa, sites that offered “near instant gratification” and, from the user’s perspective, free downloads. On the next slide he listed the “dark side.” They were:
-Unreliable downloads
-Unreliable quality (“a lot of these songs are encoded by 7-year-olds and they don’t do a great job.”)
-No previews
-No album cover art
-It’s stealing (“it’s best not to mess with karma.”)
Jobs continued to paint a picture of the villain, using Kazaa as the antagonist in the narrative. He demonstrated how a typical user might have to guess at among the 50 or 60 files of the same song and choose which one to download. “The download is slow as molasses and craps out half way through.” Finally, he said, you’ve downloaded the song only to discover it was encoded poorly and the last few seconds had been cut off. After 15 minutes, the user gets a clean version of the song. Jobs brilliantly put this time into perspective:
“What that means is you’ll spend at an hour at that rate and you’ll get four songs; four songs that cost under four bucks from Apple and you calculate that you are working for under minimum wage.”
Jobs challenged the notion that 99 cents was too much for a song by saying:
“How much is 99 cents? How many of you had a Starbucks latte this morning? Three bucks. That’s three songs. How many lattes got sold across the U.S this morning? A lot. Nine-nine cents is pretty affordable.”
Finally, Jobs listed the benefits (the hero) of downloading songs on the new iTunes Music Store. His slide revealed the following text:
-Fast, reliable downloads
-Pristine encoding
-Previews of every song
-Album cover art
-Good Karma
In 10 minutes Jobs completely transformed the mindset of those who didn’t believe in paying 99 cents, let alone any price, for the songs they were already downloading. He also convinced skeptical analysts that the service would provide a strong enough benefit to encourage music lovers to spend 99 cents a song and make money for Apple.
The next time you face a skeptical audience, paint a picture of the villain before you introduce your product or service—the conquering hero.