Silicon Insider: Steve Jobs, Music Mogul

May 1 -- Two cheers for Steve Jobs.

With Apple Computer's announcement this week of iTunes Music Store, its online library of downloadable songs, we may finally see the reassertion of reason on the music industry.

There is no little irony to the fact that the music industry, which has made billions celebrating the outlaw life, based in a town founded on movies idolizing Prohibition-era gangsters, is now in the business of suing millions of children for bootlegging.

You don't have to be a marketing genius to realize that: 1) It won't work; 2) The music business is alienating its own customer base, and 3) It will drive the development of new technologies that will eventually kill the record industry.

Enter Steve Jobs, a rock star in his own world, who understands these three points better than anybody. I am no fan of Jobs the human being, but I respect him mightily as a high-tech leader. Jobs may be the greatest innovator (not inventor, though he is often mistakenly credited with that, too) in tech history — that is, no one has ever equaled his skill at matching new technology to sophisticated design to market desire.

Jobs is also a killer. The Apple II, after all, wiped out both the minicomputer and computer terminal industries. And the Macintosh, once it was armed with desktop publishing software, gutted the printing profession.

Old Industry Gets a New Model

If ever there was an industry ripe for plucking it is the music industry. It is the Ottoman Empire of American business. It used to be hungry and shady, but produced a quality product. But now it has grown rich, fat and decadent — and the product is shoddy. It's 1962 all over again, the radio filled with over-engineered pablum performed by TV and movie stars pretending to be musicians. Only this time one senses that there is no British Invasion waiting in the wings to restore rock to its roots.

Kids sense this malaise, even if they don't know its historic antecedents. They know they are getting ripped off by $16 CDs that contain one good song. That's why the occasional real band with real talent, like White Stripes or Linkin Park, rockets up the charts. That's why bands with arcane, but at least sincere, music such as Cold Play and Radiohead are unlikely success stories. Kids know that they live in a rotten time for music.They know why, too. And that's why tens of millions of them gleefully jumped aboard Napster, and even the egregious Kazaa, to illegally download free tunes.