What were some of the challenges in building iTunes and the music store?
Bell: It was a big project, so there were many components to it, which could be a challenge. However, we thought of what we were doing as less of a challenge and more of an opportunity to build something that would be important for digital music. That said, it’s not trivial to build such a great infrastructure. It requires an incredible back end and software, and it required us to leverage all corners of the operation. We wanted to have QuickTime movie trailers, and an online commerce component, and everything else you see in iTunes now. And we had to put the pieces together in a way that the customer didn’t see any of them, that they would just see a seamless application that was easy to use. It was an enormous amount of work. Tell me about the experience of negotiating licensing terms with record labels. At the time, no one had ever achieved such a favorable set of terms, from DRM to copying allowances to song pricing. How did Apple do it? Bell: Of course we can’t discuss the specifi
