There are always going to be debates about who came up with an idea as transformative to Apple’s business as the iTunes and the iPod, but here’s one you may not have heard before: Richard Branson.
In a new interview with the i paper, the Virgin head honcho claims the concept behind Apple’s turnaround duo of inventions was originally made by him as a joke — only for Steve Jobs to take it seriously, and later go on to put it into action.
“On April Fool’s Day 1986 I gave an interview to a big-name music publication and told them that Virgin had been secretly developing a ‘Music Box’, on which we had stored every music track we could lay our hands on, and from which music lovers would, for a small fee, be able to download any individual song or album they wanted,” Branson says.
