A New Irreverent Spirit at Apple

It had been only four hours since Jimmy Iovine had agreed to sell Beats Electronics to Apple for $3 billion, but it was clear that he had already gotten the corporate memo.

“I’m at Apple now. I can’t say anything,” he told a crowd of technology executives Wednesday night at the Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., referring to Apple’s famously tight-lipped culture.

But it was also clear that for Mr. Iovine — as for the late Apple co-founder Steven P. Jobs — rules are made to be broken.

During an hour-plus conversation with the journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, with the Apple executive Eddy Cue at his side, Mr. Iovine proceeded to speak his mind about a lot of things.

The free earbuds that come with every Apple iPhone? Awful. “You listen to ‘Apocalypse Now’ and a helicopter sounds like a mosquito,” he said.

The Beats partnership with Hewlett-Packard? A marriage of convenience that will be terminated when the contract is up. “Computers are made for talk,” he said. Aside from Apple, “every other computer sounds like a portable television.” Beats struck the HP deal, he said, to make Dell jealous enough to improve the sound of its computer speakers.

Hollywood? “Desperately insecure.” Silicon Valley? “Overconfident.”

Uh, did anyone tell Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, that Mr. Iovine, a music mogul with an impressive track record, was going to be a little hard to control?

Mr. Iovine will have an office at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., but it is impossible to imagine him settling into a cubicle.

He may not even settle into the culture of Silicon Valley, where algorithms rule the roost. Those mysterious mathematical formulas, which determine Google’s search results and Facebook’s news feed, should not apply to an art form like music, Mr. Iovine said.

“Algorithms can’t do the job alone,” he said. Human curation, which Beats uses for its streaming music service, is essential.

Then again, when someone dared to point out that Beats has had trouble attracting paying users to its streaming service, he relied on the excuse used by every struggling Silicon Valley chief executive: It’s too early to judge. “Most important is we’re getting the product right,” he said.

Asked about competitors, Mr. Iovine said artists did not concern themselves with such things. “When you’re making music, you don’t look at what’s going on in the studio next to you,” he said. “We run our race. We market our race.”

Yet he has paid enough attention to Spotify, one of the leading streaming services, to declare that its business model does not work. “Spotify should have 10 million people in America” alone, he said. Instead it has 10 million paying customers spread across the globe.

Mr. Iovine’s irrepressible spirit — and his willingness to simply declare something to be reality regardless of the complexity of the facts — bears a marked resemblance to the “reality distortion field” that Mr. Jobs so famously emanated.

Indeed, Mr. Iovine appears to recognize that bluster is part of his business magic. He said that Beats spent “zero dollars” on marketing during its first three years, relying solely on media attention and product placements to build its sales to $500 million.

“We knew how to harness the media,” he said. Mr. Jobs would have been proud.

Mr. Iovine said he and Dr. Dre, his Beats co-founder, had long considered the folks at Apple, especially Mr. Cue and the late Mr. Jobs, to be kindred spirits.

“We met with the guys, and what we realized is they get it,” he said. “They have feel. They understand culture.”

And apparently they understand that Mr. Iovine is a force of nature.