Except that Apple didn't decide not to move forward -- Sivers assumed that Apple had decided not to move forward, based on an offhand reference by Jobs in a keynote.
Maybe they were just busy dealing with the bigger labels first, and put a positive public spin on their delay.
I was hanging on his every word, since we were hearing nothing else from them. So his keynote seemed to be a decision. Instead, it was just an important lesson on spin and circumstance.
Negotiating with the majors for content and pricing and access was worst hard-ball negotiations I've ever seen and schizophrenic at that. One of their big fears of course was enabling a market that would erode their competitive advantage in distribution and allow smaller players to sell music in ways indistinguishable from their own.
I have no direct inside knowledge, but I'd bet big you were just on the ass end of a power play that otherwise had little to do with CD Baby. Your catalog was a huge stick that could have been wielded in many ways in those fights. The contract that arrived the next day had an NDA, so suddenly you weren't able to disclose the terms of any deal you might have right?
As an aside, congratulations for sticking with your model and your principles and surviving that whole decade. It wasn't easy at all to make it in that market, my resume is just a bunch of smoldering craters from that period.
It could be that Steve Jobs was somehow being manipulative and singling out CD Baby. Or it could just have been that the company was bogged down. You said yourself that hundreds of others were at that original meeting. That's like herding cats. In fact, the entire iTunes Music Store was an exercise in herding thousands of cats. I still have a hard time believing it got done.
Regardless, it's still a good tale. You never know, right?
That's interesting. I wonder if you or anyone else had raised a question about this at the presentation. Communication is a key aspect of partnership. And if there is little communication, or terms on communication SLAs, then there is plentiful scope for ill partnership.
Reading your notes about the presentation on Slashdot, it appears that Apple had thought very carefully and prepared extensively about the iTunes business model. I am pretty sure they must have had something about this aspect as well. Its pretty surprising that no one else on the other side raised anything about it.
i think because you walked away in a classy way you demonstrated power and that brought them back to the table.