Roger McNamee: 'Music Category Is More Important To Apple Emotionally Than It Is From Business Perspective'

Apple Inc. AAPL’s Annual Worldwide Developers Conference started on Monday and fans are expecting the company to make announcements regarding the launch of its music streaming service.

Roger McNamee, Elevation Partners co-founder, was on CNBC Monday to discuss the importance of being in music business for Apple and share his outlook on the stock.

Apple Music

“I think from Apple’s perspective the music category is more important to them emotionally than it is from a business perspective,” McNamee said. “If you do the math, at $10 a month, $120 a year they are going to have to have tens of millions of subscribers to even show up in the income statement. I think, what this is really about is this conference Apple is addressing half-a-dozen of the biggest complaint people had about its operating system, about its capabilities relative to Android and I think…that stuff really does matter.”

He continued, “If you can get developers excited about the platform, that’s a big deal and the music thing is part of that. I don’t know that it’s going to make any difference income statement-wise, but it does matter to developers, it does matter to consumers and so from Apple’s point of view, I think it’s going to be a pretty good day.”

Won’t Continue Outperformance

On his outlook for Apple’s stock, McNamee said, “I think Apple as a stock looks like the market. It’s really hard to imagine it continuing to outperform simply because it’s the largest stock we have. That said, on fundamentals Apple is much more attractively positioned than the S&P. So, I still like it as a stock, but it is obviously not going to provide that level of outperformance all that much longer just because the math doesn’t work.”