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Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame: Steve Jobs gives music a bad name. That’s according to poodle-haired rocker Jon Bon Jovi, who blames the Apple boss personally for “killing the music business”.
Describing his average day to The Times (paywall link), 1980s stadium-filler Bon Jovi laments how kids today are missing out on the music-buying experience of his faraway youth. Getting all misty-eyed about shopping for music in one of those old-timey record shops that used to clutter up the place, the Ally McBeal star claims “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business”.
It seems iTunes is bad medicine. JBJ describes how the younger generation treat music as something easily accessed and therefore disposable: “My kids listen to all kinds of stuff. Stephanie loves music, but she clicks a button and doesn’t even remember she’s downloaded a song because she gets distracted by some website. And she doesn’t even listen to a whole album, it’s just a song.”
Presumably staring misty-eyed into the distance, the man who once sang “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” continues, “Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it.”
Sure, he’s done away with a few things, and we wouldn’t want to live in a world where he ran everything, but blaming Jobs personally seems a bit harsh. After all, music and technology have always gone in hand in hand. We guess Bon Jovi joins Gordon Brown in being crossed off the ailing Apple CEO’s Christmas card list.
Who’s right: Jovi or Jobsy? Do you miss buying and discovering music the old-fashioned way, or are record shops as out of date as a frizzy mullet and skin-tight leopardskin trousers? Which is better: living online or livin’ on a prayer? Rock out in the comments or on our Facebook wall. And remember — keep the faith.
Finally, because we can:
