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Dare blogged about why he works at Microsoft and pointed to Jens leaving Apple in contrasting his experience. One piece that stood out to me was the discussion of individuality being frowned upon at Apple, while being allowed at Microsoft. Jens made it clear that Apple pays very close attention to its image, which means employees are all potential dangers who might put across the wrong message.

In the music industry, this mindset is more or less the norm. For those groups who put across that they have no concern for image, the reality is that "who cares" is their image. This focus on appearance spawned early on with the Internet and applications like Photoshop becoming standard tools. People in music had the chance to publish themselves on the web and utilize tools that helped them rival the main stream acts. This resulted in an extremely competitive market with any and every band appearing as though they were a major label act.

In addition to better looks, the industry became exceedingly prolific. Cheaper recording gear and effects made it possible to get major label quality recordings. This impacted the style of music with more dance based music being put out, but overall everyone was able to get more music published.

Today there is an insane amount of bands who are putting out great music and appear professional. Labels, managers, booking agents, and everyone else work as first round filters to helping bands get beyond local recognition. Everyone understands that the image and impression of the band/label is critical to success. If your image has been associated with something or someone who is not considered "cool", then you are hastily lumped in the same bucket. The problem is that no one has the time to really evaluate music for its quality, so the filtering bodies must be present in order to find anything at all.

This is a very depressing picture, but bringing it back to Apple, it is life. Apple understands that presenting yourself as cool and hip is always going to trump actual deliverables. In the long run, you still need to deliver something, but people ignore bad decisions if the result is slightly less helpful while still looking great.

The iPhone is a good example of a device having some warts that are easy to ignore. You can't text an image to someone. There is no GPS integration with google maps. There is no flash in Safari. The camera is really bad. There are probably more issues, but I still love my iPhone. I have fun using it and that makes it easy to overlook the obvious deficiencies. That is what having a good image is all about, balancing the functions with form such that it is a profitable combination. Essentially, creating an effective image really is creating art. The goals are different in that art measured based on the relationship between the artist and the audience, but the method is essentially the same.

Many people believe that considering art and image is shallow. People think that someone should do something they love because they love it and never taint it with external factors such as making money or marketing. The problem is that doesn't reflect the real challenges of doing something you love. People in sports are forced to learn defense and offense even though scoring points is what matters. If you only pay attention to the most important part, you miss the elegance of the entire world built around the one important piece. It may seem distasteful, but it is a necessary evil that should not be avoided, but considered another challenge in producing something amazing.