From Ghettoblaster to Spotify: Why Innovation Fails When You Confuse Products with Jobs

Nobody ever wanted a cassette, a CD, or an MP3. They wanted music that moved with them.

Picture a kid in the 1980s walking down the street with a massive ghettoblaster on their shoulder. The music is loud, the batteries heavy, the device almost absurdly oversized. Fast forward to today: a teenager is sitting on a train, earbuds in, lost in a playlist streamed from their phone. Two very different products, but the same fundamental need.

The job never changed. People still want to enjoy music wherever they are. What changed were the technologies that made that job easier, lighter, more personal, and eventually infinite.

This is the core lesson of Jobs to Be Done (JTBD). If you define your business by the product you sell, you will one day become obsolete. If you define it by the job your customers are hiring you to do, you can adapt and thrive across generations of technology.

Products die. Jobs don’t.

The Core Job Never Changed

JTBD isn’t about creativity. It’s about stripping away technology and focusing on what people are really trying to accomplish.

Nobody ever wanted a cassette. Or a CD. Or an MP3 file. Those were just means to an end. The real job was simple: help me enjoy music wherever I am.

When you frame it this way, the progression of solutions makes sense. Each generation of product was another attempt to deliver on that timeless job, shaped by new constraints, new technologies, and new cultural currents.

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Functional, Social, and Emotional Jobs Evolve Together

The mistake many leaders make is reducing JTBD to function alone. But jobs are layered. They include:

• Functional jobs — the core task (listen to music anywhere).

• Social jobs — how I want to be seen by others while doing it.

• Emotional jobs — how I want to feel while doing it.

When you map music’s evolution through these layers, you see why ghettoblasters, Walkmans, iPods, and Spotify all made sense in their time. They solved the same functional job but tapped into very different social and emotional contexts.

The Timeline of Shifting Jobs