Everybody loves iTunes, right? The user-friendly experience of clicking the buy button, the huge catalogue of artists and albums available on it (with The Beatles, too), the integrated environment with iOS devices and Macs. Everybody loves iTunes.
Actually, no. Bon Jovi hates it and he thinks Steve Jobs is “personally responsible” for killing the music business. Seriously, according to Bon Jovi the man just took away the magic of buying physical records and firing up your walkman. In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, Bon Jovi went ahead with the following statements:
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. God, it was a magical, magical time. 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.
On a related note, Gutenberg is personally responsible for killing handwritten books. Oh, the magic of manually writing thousands of copies of the same book. And that Simjian guy? Man, he totally took the beauty of manually withdrawing cash away from me. Not to mention the insane operation by Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner: with the invention of lighters, he killed the pleasure of manually lighting my cigars.
Let me tell you something, Bon Jovi. This little thing you hate is called “progress”. Yes, the same progress that allows your guitars to be amplified on stage. So perhaps next time, instead of blaming Steve Jobs for a digital market revolution that came after years of research at Apple, you’d like to think about it and consider that if some artists still manage to produce their records, it’s because of the ease of use of digital downloads. [via Cult of Mac]
