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“Visionary” is a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially in the tech world. Anyone who suggest anything different from the status quo is hailed as one, and if they’re wrong, well, who remembers?

But Greg Sandoval of Cnet stumbled across an interview that Steve Jobs gave to Rolling Stone in 2003, outlining his vision for the then-new iTunes music store. Steve lays out his “vision” on how the online music business will play out with his customary confidence and startling clarity, and it turns out he was pretty much on the money.

Jobs on whether the iPod could become more important to Apple than the Mac.
Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: we do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we’re really good at packaging that all together into a product.

We’re the only people left in the computer industry (who) do that. And we’re really the only people in the consumer electronics industry (who) go deep in software in consumer products. So those talents can be used to make personal computers, and they can also be used to make things like iPods.

On major music labels
When the Internet came along, and Napster came along, they didn’t know what to make of it. A lot of these folks didn’t use computers—weren’t on e-mail; didn’t really know what Napster was for a few years. They were pretty doggone slow to react. Matter of fact, they still haven’t really reacted, in many ways.

On iTunes
We’ve created this music store, which I think is nontrivial to copy. I mean, to say that Microsoft can just decide to copy it, and copy it in six months—that’s a big statement. It may not be so easy.

Steve goes on to predict that technological solutions (that is, DRM) to piracy would fail, and that subscription-based music programs would be far less popular than buying tracks. If anything, Jobs is far too humble (and how often do you hear that?) about the success of the ITMS, predicting that Apple would “one day” sell a billion songs a year—and in the last six months they’ve gone from five to six billion.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, Sandoval has a brilliant summary. This is why Steve Jobs is called a visionary, and why everyone is freaked about his health.

Read [Cnet] and [Rolling Stone] Via [Daring Fireball]