By Pete Mortensen (2:10 am, Mar. 15, 2011)
As we noted earlier, the weekend`s silliest headline came courtesy of hair product Jon Bon Jovi, who ranted to the Sunday Times of London that "Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business."
This argument is astoundingly ignorant.
The iTunes Music Store is well the most popular record shop in the story of the world, having sold more than 10 billion songs in its eight years of existence. One can decry the very feeling of digital distribution. It`s inconceivable to contend with concern that big.
Moreover, when iTMS hit the setting in April 2003, it was a windfall to record labels. After all, Apple didn`t invent digital distribution of music. They invented legitimate digital distribution. Napster had hit the prospect a total 4 years previous, making it possible for college students across the country (myself included, briefly) to readily share reasonably high-quality music files with one another over the Net in elementary fashion. As shortly as Shawn Fanning flipped the change in 1999, the music business needed to transfer itself or disappear.
For years, it chose to disappear, waging costly legal battles with Napster and its near-relatives Audiogalaxy, MP3.com, Gnutella, Kazaa, Morpheus, and LimeWire. Hilariously, the Recording Industry Association of America`s belief that they could sue file sharing out of world did little but spur its development and, more critically, its innovation. BitTorrent, the radically distributed and difficult-to-trace open file sharing protocol, hit in 2001, arguably a few days earlier it would have arrived had the disc companies reached a lot to broadcast music legally through Napster. Also, Metallica.
It was into this mix that Steve Jobs arrived. And with him, the book industry finally changed. A little. They eventually signed on with a logical way to purchase music over the Internet, for just 99 cents a song. And it was revolutionary, driving unprecedented volumes and moving a lot of iPods in the process. But, like Bon Jovi, the book industry has a poor memory, and immediately began demanding to sell songs for more money on iTunes, as good as demanding a higher part of receipts from each tune, even though, at 70:30, they were already doing better than a typical margin at a book store.
Anyway, they got what they wanted again, but yet they rant and whine about devaluing music or kill the court of the art form. Generally, they resent that the vast iTunes library has allowed indie bands to get more care than they always were when major labels controlled distribution. And those indie labels are doing great now (see what Merge Records has accomplished with Arcade Fire and Spoon), as are about of the main record stores that thrive off of their albums.
Honestly, at the end of the day, the Web`s arrival in the early 1990s was a house that all media would finally be delivered differently than it previously had. It was obvious that early. But the entrenched media covered their eyes and their ears and hoped things could stay the same. And now that an inevitable world of digital music, video, books, and periodicals have arrived, everyone wants to get mad at the one company that`s really helped figure out how to produce record labels some money in the final decade. Whether they wish it or not.
In short, JonBon: "This Left Feels Right" killed music. Steve Jobs is the one who helped you gain from that murder.
The Sunday Times Magazine: LITD: Jon Bon Jovi, 48, rockstar (paywall)
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