I like art, and am all for it. But nobody should mistake it for a business.
Want to make a poignant, subtle art-house film? Go for it. Want to make a blockbuster sequel which will be predictably profitable? Go for it. But please don't raise money like you're doing the latter and then do the former. Steve Jobs said, "Real artist ship." And given his record at Apple, I suspect he'd agree that real artists ship things people want.
No one has said it better than Steve Jobs himself:
"We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our whole music libraries around with us. The team worked really hard. And the reason that they worked so hard is because we all wanted one. You know? I mean, the first few hundred customers were us."
"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do."
Classic Jobs indeed. In the sense that iTunes was originally called SoundJam MP and not done by Apple, but published through Casady & Greene and bought up. But he knew to tell and sell a narrative.
I remember SoundJam pre-acquisition being much more in the Winamp/Audion vein - playlist window + player window. I thought most of the library stuff came after they joined Apple. I would believe that Apple bought them and then suggested how they should build it out further.
Looking at old screenshots on Google seems to agree.
Yup. SoundJam MP was basically a Winamp clone and it became iTunes. The above comment is also ignoring the entire iTunes store was arguably the only hard part about creating iTunes.
Want to make a poignant, subtle art-house film? Go for it. Want to make a blockbuster sequel which will be predictably profitable? Go for it. But please don't raise money like you're doing the latter and then do the former. Steve Jobs said, "Real artist ship." And given his record at Apple, I suspect he'd agree that real artists ship things people want.