Bono

The Beatles kept their end of the bargain; none of them ever produced any computers. But Apple ended up wandering into the music business. It got sued again in 1991, when the Mac incorporated the ability to play musical files, then again in 2003, when the iTunes Store was launched. The legal issues were finally resolved in 2007, when Apple made a deal to pay Apple Corps $500 million for all worldwide rights to the name, and then licensed back to the Beatles the right to use Apple Corps for their record and business holdings. Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For that to happen, the Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of their songs, had to negotiate their own differences over how to handle the digital rights. “The Beatles all want to be on iTunes,” Jobs later recalled, “but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can’t get divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes was something I very much hoped I would live to resolve.” As it turned out, he would. Bono Bono, the lead singer of U2, deeply appreciated Apple’s marketing muscle. He was confident that his Dublin-based band was still the best in the world, but in 2004 it was trying, after almost thirty years together, to reinvigorate its image. It had produced an exciting new album with a song that the band’s lead guitarist, The Edge, declared to be “the mother of all rock tunes.” Bono knew he needed to find a way to get it some traction, so he placed a call to Jobs. “I wanted something specific from Apple,” Bono recalled. “We had a song called ‘Vertigo’ that featured an aggressive guitar riff that I knew would be contagious, but only if people were exposed to it many, many times.” He was worried that the era of promoting a song through airplay on the radio was over. So Bono visited Jobs at home in Palo Alto, walked around the garden, and made an unusual pitch. Over the years U2 had spurned offers as high as $23 million to be in commercials. Now he wanted Jobs to use the band in an iPod commercial for free—or at least as part of a mutually beneficial package. “They had never done a commercial before,” Jobs later recalled. “But they were getting ripped off by free downloading, they liked what we were doing with iTunes, and they thought we could promote them to a younger audience.” Any other CEO would have jumped into a mosh pit to have U2 in an ad, but Jobs pushed back a bit. Apple didn’t feature recognizable people in the iPod ads, just silhouettes. (The Dylan ad had not yet been made.) “You have silhouettes of fans,” Bono replied, “so couldn’t the next phase be silhouettes of artists?” Jobs said it sounded like an idea worth exploring. Bono left a copy of the unreleased album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, for Jobs to hear. “He was the only person outside the band who had it,” Bono said.