Young doesn't like the sound of Apple

They don't go into very much detail, but Fortune reports Neil Young having a go at Apple:

“Apple has taken a detour down the convenience highway,” Young told the Brainstorm audience after taking the stage for an interview with Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey. “Quality has taken a complete backseat - if it even gets in the car at all.”
[...]
Young complained that music has become “like wallpaper” - more Muzak than music. “We have beautiful computers now but high-resolution music is one of the missing elements,” he said. “The ears are the windows to the soul.”

It does, of course, come down to what you want - immediate access to hundreds of thousands of tracks in acceptable quality, or a strictly controlled supply of super high quality tracks. The sad truth is, that for most people, for most songs, the quality of iTunes (and the Zune store) is good enough, for the same reason that before music shifted to computers, most people weren't going to spend twenty, thirty quid for gold-plated connectors for their hi-fi equipment. Hell, before the computer age, most music was played through crappy equipment - portable CD players, never-cleaned cassette machines, wobbly record players with enough fluff on the needle to keep Ken Dodd in tickling sticks for a decade and a half.

Young is right; the quality of digital music isn't the very highest. But - much as with Pete Townshend's comments on how iTunes is just a way of selling music - he's comparing it with a golden past that never existed.