Listen Up! Beats Boss Jimmy Iovine Comes to Dive Into Media.
We’re just a couple weeks away from our D: Dive into Media conference, but there’s always time to add an icon to the lineup: We’re very pleased to announce that music kingpin Jimmy Iovine will be joining us onstage.
Iovine is the studio engineer turned producer turned label executive turned headphone impressario, and he’s worked with everyone from Bruce Springsteen to U2 to Eminem to Lady Gaga. Current titles: Chairman, Interscope Records, and co-founder, Beats By Dre.
Those credentials alone would make him a fascinating interview, but now he has added another line to his resume: He’s trying to create a digital music subscription service with mass market appeal.
Lots of folks have tried this, but only Spotify seems to have had some success so far. Iovine thinks he can do much better, with a secret sauce that has something to do with a lot of curation and hand-holding.
That kind of confidence in your own taste-making ability runs counter to a lot of today’s digital ethos, which holds that people will figure out what they want to hear (or watch, or whatever) on their own, or with the help of friends, or with code. And Iovine thinks that’s bunk. So this should be a fun conversation!
And we’ll have a bunch of them next month. Here’s the lineup of speakers for Dive, which we’re holding Feb. 11 and 12 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Calif: Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Hearst Magazines president David Carey, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora, Facebook partnership vice president Dan Rose, HBO co-President Eric Kessler, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen, Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith, Intel media head Erik Huggers and Samsung media head David Eun, Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (and guests), New Republic owner Chris Hughes, USA Today publisher Larry Kramer, Dish Network founder Charlie Ergen, and Microsoft Xbox executives Yusuf Mehdi and Nancy Tellem.
Want to join them? Head here, and we’ll see you soon.
