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Jon Bon Jovi calls Steve Jobs a killer
Who killed the music industry? I'd always thought it would turn out to be like Murder On The Orient Express, with lots of people having had a little stab, but Jon Bon Jovi, out of the Jon Bon Jovi and The Bon Jovis, points the finger at just one man:
And yet he accuses Steve Jobs of being the scorpion in the decline of jacket-based music purchases: "I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: 'What happened?' Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business."Yes. Not just in a metaphorical sense, but personally. Like he finished it off with a car jack.
That noise you can hear? It's Shawn Fanning yelling "yes - it was Steve Jobs! Clearly, the man is guilty. He alone. Phew."
I'm sure Jobs already has a defence prepared - given that the iPod and iTunes found a way to successfully sell music tracks fairly easily available elsewhere for free, he might hope to be seen as having helped keep an ailing industry alive. Bon Jovi's attack is a bit like having a go at the Good Samaritan for no other reason than he happened to be there at the time.
Bon worries that children are missing out on whole experience:
[H]e believes people today miss "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."... before getting it home and discovering it was a bit rubbish.
If Jovi's big worry is that people no longer buy records without hearing them first, then shouldn't his ire be directed at listening posts in HMV? Or, more accurately, at whoever first put those booths in record shops back when Paul McCartney was alive?
Still: nobody buys records based purely on what the cover looks like anymore. It's a tragic loss. I felt exactly the same way when the last Pig-In-A-Poke salesman went out of business.
5 comments:
Mr BJ appears to be suffering from amnesia; you couldn't buy a record with a "jacket" in most high street shops after about 1990. With CDs it became enough of a challenge just to work out who the album was by, let alone make a decision based on who had a cool haircut. Personally I always liked to put myself through the massive inconvenience of asking the shop staff to play a few tracks for me first, although I must confess to purchasing Destroyer by Kiss using the Bon Jovi Method. It was of course shit.
There seem to be some problems with the Indelicates post, which is why this one merges with that one when I view the main blog.
"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."
Beauty? Try idiocy. And reminiscent of Tusser's "a fool and his money are soon parted".
@Robin
Thanks for pointing that out, Robin - malformed HTML had broken the bottom of the post. Fixed now.
I'm sure it's an oversight but Mr Jovi appears to have forgotten to remove his band's songs from iTunes.
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