April 25, 2003 9:20 am
Pui-Wing Tam reports for the Wall Street Journal that Steve Jobs' personal involvement has helped Apple's as-yet-unannounced music service secure rights to most of The Eagles' recordings.

The popular 70's rock band has been a holdout for other legitimate digital music services that have asked to include the band's catalog in their libraries. Irving Azoff, the Eagle's manager, said that he hasn't liked other online services, but he liked Apple's.

The article cites Apple's decision to move into the digital music publication business as a way for the company to grow its business despite faltering marketshare in the personal computer industry. The Journal suggests that Apple and Jobs have promised record executives that it will focus marketing efforts on getting out word about the new music service with an advertising campaign to rival its "Think Different" and "Switch" campaigns.

Reportedly, Apple's new service will be integrated with iTunes and will work solely with Macs, at least for now. Users will be charged $0.99 per song and $10 or so per album. The Journal article also sheds some light on the digital rights protection scheme Apple's service may use -- apparently, it will be more difficult to use iPods to transfer songs between computers, and users won't be able to e-mail or otherwise transfer songs to their friends' computers. The service will also allow legitimate users to play the songs on up to three Macs and an unlimited number of registered iPods, however.

The Journal also notes that Apple has also licensed the music of No Doubt -- another band that has been recalcitrant to see its works distributed electronically -- and other artists that haven't yet gone online. As a result, Apple's music service is to have an "Exclusives" area showcasing some of these unique artists.

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Responding to a shareholder question, Jobs reportedly answered, "There have been a lot of rumors in the last few weeks. Many of them are not true and some of them are true."

Apple has sent some media outlets an invitation to a press event scheduled for April 28 that would sport "announcements that will be music to your ears." The news has fueled speculation that Apple may unveil some type of music service -- long rumored, but never confirmed. When a shareholder asked about whether Apple had plans to offer such a capability, Jobs said coyly, "You'd think so if you haven't been asleep the last two weeks."

Jobs said later that he's never seen Apple employees work as hard as they are now, and that morale at the company was "very high." He added that Apple leads the computer industry in innovation.

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