Jimmy Iovine explains why Apple Music is ahead of the game

Curation is the name of the game, or at least, that’s what Jimmy Iovine thinks. The Apple Music executive and Beats co-founder recently sat down for an interview with Wired to talk about Apple Music’s journey over the past few months and what we can expect in the future. One things that Iovine brought up numerous times throughout the interview is curation and how it’s what puts Apple ahead of the competition.  

Apple once revolutionised music by putting 1,000 songs in your pocket. (Then 5,000… then 40,000.) Now it wants to do it again by putting one song on your iPhone: the one you need to hear next. “I started this curation conversation six years ago, and everyone thought I was talking about The Force, like it was an ancient religion,” says Jimmy Iovine, 62, a legendary producer, Interscope and Beats co-founder and latterly, since Beats Electronics’ $3.2 billion (£2 billion) Apple buyout in 2014, a creative force behind Apple Music, the company’s new streaming service. “But now that’s all people talk about. Of course [music] needs curation. Curation was supposedly not hip — that’s bullshit. Curation is a big thing to us, and no one is going to be able to catch us or do it better.”