Image Credit: Landov; EPA/Monica M. Davey/Landov
Shot through the heart, and Steve Jobs is to blame.
That is Jon Bon Jovi`s assessment of the flow province of the music industry. Bon Jovi (of the iconic rock group "Jon") had some uncharacteristically harsh words for Apple and its turtlenecked benevolent dictator Steve Jobs in an audience with the London-based Sunday Times Magazine.
Sounding a bit like an old man protective of his lawn - the quote literally starts with "kids today" - Bon Jovi bemoaned the fact that the young`uns no longer bear "the see of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album, and the dish of winning your margin money and devising a decision based on the jacket, not learned what the record sounded like, and look at a pair of still pictures and imagining it."
There are lot of things to trouble about with Apple and its friendly, jangly-themed chokehold on the way we have music, but this kind of nostalgia grief isn`t one of them. Sure, that particular visceral experience is gone, replaced by one of swiping and tapping, but kids now have literally hundreds of thousands of songs at their fingertips thanks to the Internet, whole genres they can peruse on YouTube that they would have never yet considered back when they had to beat out their weekly allowance for a 1 album.
To put it simply: Whereas Tommy used to make on the docks, bringing home his pay for the newest lackluster Whitesnake album, now he can freely test-drive that album and almost any other before deciding to buy it. It doesn`t pass the feel of discovery, only the smell of paying a bundle of money to the already bloated record industry for a possible disappointment.
The other job with Bon Jovi singling out Steve Jobs as a straw man to charge for the fall of the music industry is that Jobs is very pretty much the only guy who has managed to successfully monetize online music consumption. It`s okay if you wish to mourn the release of physical albums - preferably by lighting votive candles around a transcript of Cracked Rear View - but only love that you might as well also own a gramophone and a Kinetoscope.
Old media die, new media are born, it`s the set of iLife: YouTube killed the tv star, video killed the radio star, radio killed the traveling minstrel, and minstrelsy killed banging rocks on other rocks to some kind of rhythm. No question in 50 years, Justin Bieber will kick in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech about how kids no longer recognize the joy of flipping through an iPod library now that medicine is just beamed directly into their frontal lobes.
Ah, well. Now if you`ll excuse me, I`m going to go listen to Slippery When Wet on my iPod.
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