Jimmy Iovine & Dr. Dre talk Apple Music, their USC program, & more in Wired cover story
Wired’s new cover story featuring Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre includes interviews with the Beats co-founders turned Apple executives and also some quotes from others on the Apple Music team. The article has a lot of backstory on the duo pre Apple’s acquisition of Beats, much of which we’ve heard in the past, but mostly discusses the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, an undergraduate program the two Apple executives have started at the University of Southern California.
“If you tell a kid, ‘You’ve got to pick music or Instagram,’ they’re not picking music,” Iovine says. “There was a time when, for anybody between the ages of 15 and 25, music was one, two, and three. It’s not anymore.”
The school aims to create a new generation of creative executives by assembling a faculty drawn from the schools of art, business, and engineering in an ambitious new curriculum. This, Iovine says, will be his true legacy, a pipeline of professionals, equally at home in the worlds of tech and culture, who can steer the music industry through whatever displacements lie ahead. “If the school doesn’t work, to me the whole thing failed,” Iovine says. “Because then you’ve got to pray for freaks, and that’s no way to run a business.”
You can read the full Wired cover story online here.
