Bon Jovi vs. Steve Jobs

In an interview with England's Sunday Times Magazine, Jon Bon Jovi lamented the current state of the music business — particularly iTunes' victory over the brick-and-mortar record shop. "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," he said. "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." Does the rocker have a point, or is he just betraying his bitterness?

Don't blame Apple: The fact that kids listen to MP3s instead of records "doesn’t eliminate the sense of discovery" they get from new music, says Keith Staskiewicz at Entertainment Weekly — it just saves them money. And it's wrong to blame Apple for destroying anything, because "Jobs is really pretty much the only guy who has managed to successfully monetize online music consumption." Plus, change is just part of the business. "No doubt in 50 years, Justin Bieber will complain in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech" about how kids don't listen to iPods anymore.

"Jon Bon Jovi accuses Steve Jobs of being 'personally responsible for killing the music business'"

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Things are better today than in the good old days: "At least [Bon Jovi] recognizes he sounds like an old man," says Mike Masnick at Techdirt. Let's put things in perspective: the pre-MP3 days may have been "magical," as he puts it, but "what about all the people who bought the album based on the jacket," then discovered it was "crap"? These days, consumers have far more freedom: They "listen to what they want, wherever they want," and have access to all kinds of music they wouldn't have known about otherwise. That's far more "magical" than anything Bon Jovi describes.

"Bon Jovi thinks Steve Jobs killed music; more old-rockers shooing those darn kids off their lawn"

Bon Jovi is still around? "Do you know what was on the cover of the last Bon Jovi album, or even that there was a last Bon Jovi album?" says Kyle Buchanan at New York. Of course not. It's just laughable to nail Jobs as the one who's "personally thwarted the most important criteria you could use when deciding whether to buy a record: the ability to discern for yourself just how feathery Jon Bon Jovi's chunky Meg Ryan do is on the album jacket."

"Jon Bon Jovi is mad at Steve Jobs"