In an article by Anmar Frangoul for The Sunday Times, Jon Bon Jovi states:
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.
Full article, subscription required, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Johnny Bongiovi misses the time when children were cajoled into parting with their allowance money for wildly overpriced, forced bundles of sight unseen, or rather, sound unheard, crapshoots; 99.9% of which were packed to the gills with filler. Ah, “the good old days.”
Johnny’s also probably upset that in order for him to sell a full album nowadays, he’d have to come up with 10-12 good songs, a feat he hasn’t accomplished during his entire lifetime. Yes, the magical, magical times certainly are over for Johnny.
Today, thanks to Steve Jobs, a good portion of music consumers still actually pay for music and also actually have – *gasp* – consumer choice! Music consumers can now buy exactly what they want while not paying for things they don’t. Imagine that! Consumers can also still buy a full album via Apple’s iTunes Store, complete with artwork and more, if they so desire. Nobody’s stopping them. And, oh by the way, artists are still getting rich. All of this is thanks to Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs is personally responsible for saving the music business, you vapid twit.
[Attribution: WENN. Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Brawndo Drinker,” “Manny S.,” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Who the hell is Jon Bon Jovi and how is his music relevant today?
Has Elvis risen from his grave?
You must ge living in the past too. Who the fsck is Elvis?
Are you Elvis? You sound like a curmudgeonly old fart.
he’s an angry dinosaur!
Bon Jovi rocks and will always be relevant.. don’t confuse his sentimentality of being able to make 2 or 3 songs people liked per album with his talent.
(Now if Def Leppard said this, they might have cred but they’d still be wrong)
Once upon a time the artists were the drivers and their music spoke for itself. The record companies and agents were just parasites in the background. Giants like Zed Zeppelin, The Doors, Santana, Joplin, Hendrix wrote what they liked and it sold. Back then we wouldn’t even listen to Top 40 radio, much less buy any of it.
Then in the late 70’s the parasites got control. It was all marketing and fake from then on. Bon Jovi was the result.
Bon Jovi is formula filler. I never listened to him in high school and college, and I admittedly listened to some crap, especially in high school. Top 40 stuff.
Sorry dude but you’re living in the past. You’re blaming Jobs for killing vinyl? The music industry did that!
Bop Till You Drop – Ry . 1st CD ever recorded.
Bop Till You Drop- Ry Cooder. 1st CD ever recorded, 1979.
Slight correction: Bop Til You Drop was the first DIGITALLY recorded rock album, not the first CD.
According to Wikipedia, the first CD pressed was “The Visitors” by ABBA, and the first released was “52nd St” by Billy Joel.
I also remember saying to the wife in the pre-iTunes days: “The problem with ‘Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits’ is that they aren’t all great”. Mr Bon Jovi should shut up and sing (something people want to buy).
Ah yes Wikipedia, the ultimate authority for a dumbed down planet.
Is Wikipedia unreliable?
Is that rhetorical?
Hurts that much to be wrong? Get your facts right and the breeze coming out of your pie hole won’t be so warm. With all due respect, of course.
Just that quoting Wikipedia as a reliable references puts you standing in mud…with all due respect of course.
Are you sure about that? In the 83, 84 time frame as a computer sales person we talked about the future when Compact Disk would hold an album and albums would sell for $5.00 because they were so cheap to produce.
Is Jon Bon Jovi Osama Bon Laden’s evil twin?
Steve Jobs, my hero, gave me this sleek little delightful device that holds 1000s of esoteric songs which I have spent over 40 years collecting, with superb sound quality, and which I can hear wherever I go, and which I can easily stream to 11 speakers throughout my house to raise the rafters in heavenly joy, all for a very affordable price, keeping me extraordinarily happy. I thank God for Steve Jobs day and night!
Amen
Praise unto the lord…
Superb sound quality??? Superb? I doubt you’ve heard superb sound quality….
I thought you might want to know.
You don’t HAVE to use the included earbuds.
He needs to shut up
He sounds stupid and misguided
Everybody was stealing music
Apple has helped the music industry
This is the same Bon Jovi that came out during the 2008 presidential campaign and said the “ONLY” people that wont vote for Mr. Obama are racists. Brilliant singer here that seems to be going down in a blaze of glory all on his own. He should zip it while he can.
I don’t care what his political persuasion is. He generally makes formula crap. Just like Ted Nugent makes crap from his perch on the right.
But wait……. Tom Petty claimed it was kids dropping all those quarters at the video arcades that was killing the music business…..
Steve Jobs was responsible for that too. He used to work at Atari : )
Sorry, but Bon Jovi sounds moronic.
Jobs killed the music business the same way he “kills” iPods and iPhones–by replacing them with superior models.
So giving music lovers more easier ways to buy and consume their love of good music is killing the music business eh?
Sorry Jon and co, Steve Jobs saved the music business. It’s not his fault that sales of your average albums have dropped through the floor.
Why not try and writing some decent songs that appeal to the modern music lover instead of trying to appeal to aging 35yr old women who have followed you since they were 16yrs old.
Hang up your guitars guys – you’re past it.
@Jon Bon Jovi,
Hey, you gave us the This Left Feels Right album. This is as much your fault as Steve’s.
Probably one of the worst albums ever. Yes, ever.
…and independent artists everywhere thank him for doing so.
The music business was living on a prayer when Steve Jobs saved it with iTunes. Jon Bon Jovi gives higher life forms a bad name. Yeah, the good old days of vinyl, when if you wanted to tote your music around you’d have to make a crappy copy onto a cassette tape to play it on your crappy cassette player in your car. Truly magical!
The music industry was “Livin’ On A Prayer” in the digital age until Apple gave those floundering fools a chance to make money with iTunes.
And there’s nothing wrong with killing today’s music *business*. The actual musicians, and the music that’s actually good, can easily survive and thrive under a new music business which isn’t so fan-hostile.
To slightly paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when he thinks his paycheck depends upon his not understanding it.
Oh-oh, he’s half-way there
Oh-oh, he’s livin on a prayer
If it were not for the macintosh and itunes, i’d still be sitting in front of my linux box running a fast tracker clone, looping one of the 20 or so free .xm files I would grab off of one of those ftp servers every now and then (I didn’t even get cover art!). I would let it loop for 5 mins or so, then it would start getting annoying so I would kill the tracker and relaunch with a different file. now I have a macbook (1st anniversary was ~ a month ago) and itunes with ~200 odd songs. And they actually have lyrics too!!!
(btw: xm is like a really simple and beepy version of midi)
You make it sound like GNU/Linux can’t play music, which is plain wrong.
I don’t see how having a Mac makes it easier to listen to music…
Too bad Jon Bon Jovi never wrote an album as magical as he describes!!!
Note that Bon Jovi says Steve Jobs “killed the music BUSINESS”. That’s a good thing – all those faceless middle men who controlled the industry but didn’t create a thing are gone! Thankfully music itself hasn’t been killed, far from it.
Also a good thing that I don’t have to buy an entire album to get the one song I liked, only to discover that the one song was the band’s attempt at something different, and the remainder of the album is horrible!
I remember when it was novel and cool that you could listen to the album in the store at the kiosk before deciding to buy it. That saved me some money as well (actually just re-directed it to a good album).
As for Jon Bon Jovi, now kids don’t need to save their allowance money for music. They can easily buy one, two, five songs at a time when they wouldn’t have plopped $17.99 down for an album. How many people have bought a Bon Jovi song for $0.99 to use in a party mix, etc. when they would never have bought the album to get the song?
I put together about 24 songs for our son’s pre-game football pump-up music. I had about 10 of them already, but bought the rest. And these are songs I will not likely ever listen to outside of pre-game warmups. Bon Jovi’s “It’s My LIfe” is in the playlist, BTW.
I guess Rock Band and Guitar Hero are ruining music as well?
I remember seeing Bon jovi live at Milton Keynes bowl in the UK and they were absolutely aweful.
It was the end of their 18 month tour, they were exhausted of playing the same 22 songs that they had performed countless times every night.
Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t remember the lyrics to those songs – and he wrote the god damn things.
Tico Torres was out of time and Richie sambora was overplaying.
Was the first and last time I saw them live – and they haven’t improved since.
My condolences. They had one song that didn’t make my ears bleed, “Livin’ on a Prayer.” I’m sorry you had to listen to the 21 other ear molestations.
And that song even sucks, maybe a little less so than his others.
Look, I think Jon Bon Jovi is wrong about this issue. Steve Jobs saved the music business from completely succumbing to online piracy. But I’m also a fan of the band. I’ve seen Bon Jovi twice in the last 4 years and both times were absolutely amazing. When did you see them? By the way, they don’t play the same setlist every night. They actually change it up much more than one would expect, so your point is moot.
1987 when they had their one good song.
U2, 1992, Mile High Stadium, Zoo TV Tour. Now, that was a concert!
Doors, 1968, San Diego, CA. The opening act was the Chambers Brothers. That was a concert!
I’m sure it was. Unfortunately, I was still 3 years from being born.
Now maybe we can bet back to a time I remember. When the word “music” was never followed by the word “business”.
It became all about the money, and it sucked.
Please stop kidding yourself. Such a time NEVER EXISTED.
The day artists no longer want to be paid for their art is the day that “music” and “business” will no longer fit in the same equation.
What, no potshots at Shawn Fanning and his ilk?
Oh, right. What have we heard from Shawn lately?
Since the iPod i play my choosen music more often with a headphone ..
Jon grew up and made his name in the era of Album-Oriented Rock, so of course he will get misty for the end of that era, but Napster did more to kill that then Steve Jobs.
Apple’s actions helped to create a logical, legal, useful structure out of the chaos and illegal fragmentation brought on by uncontrolled p2p sharing networks (that cut musicians out of the loop entirely.) Had Steve Jobs not done what he did Jon and every other musician would be forced to see recording as a marketing tool for concerts, T-shirts and paid media appearances rather than a potential direct generator of income.
Bingo. The world was waiting for a sensible convenient way for people to purchase music. The kids were waiting for a way to get music inexpensively. $20 for an album or a buck for the song they actually wanted. Rather than p2p they could get the song hassle-free. Good deal. Now they are in the habit of paying the musician.
Hey! We didn’t start the fire! It’s been burnin’ since the discs been turnin’. RCA, EMI, Universal Music Group …
Go smoke a pipe Jon, you have to be kidding me. Did he just wake up and discover iTunes? I have more music now than I ever did growing up and I never once missed the hands on of buying an actual record or CD. Granted I realize that some people like that but they are the ones on Bon Jovi’s side of the fence. At the end of the day this is a truly misguided statement that should have stayed backstage with the groupies. Sorry Jon, you lose but if you really think about it, you’re still winning. My advice to Jon Bon Jovi is pull your entire catalog of music from iTunes and come back with a statement in 3 months. nuff said.
There was a time when you bought an album for the 1 or 2 songs that got airplay. Shortly after, you ended up liking the songs that never made the radio even better, so I don’t buy the argument that 99% was filler. The album cover certainly was a big part of the experience (think Led Zepplin). When the industry started selling CD’s for about $4.00 more than vinyl, (soon after, AOL started shipping them for free) and delivered them in plastic clamshells, it was the beginning of the end. It also didn’t help when they started signing groups based on looks rather than talent (see Bon Jovi)
@artist
You have to be honest here. Buying albums back in the day was a big goatf@&k. Yes you knew the couple of songs that were on the radio every freakin hour, then you oogled at the album cover and try to place tunes to the tracklist on the back. However if you grew up when I did you hated being the sucker. Only a few artist had solid albums: Michael Jackson, led zeppelin, pink Floyd, motley Crüe, ll cool j, beastie Boys, nas, dr. dre to name some of my favs
BTW, who bought an album based on the jacket, anyway?
The Beatles White Album, for sure.
Miraculous Hump Returns From The Moon
And Spinal Tap’s “Smell the Glove”.
Santana – Abraxas
Whipped Cream-anyone?
(And the music!)
Hot d@mn, I loved that Herb Alpert album cover. The music was ok, but that lady covered with whipped cream is a fantasy of mine to this day…
Velvet Underground album with the big yellow Warhol banana too.
You have a good point about many album songs that weren’t radio hits becoming favorites. That was always the case when I bought vinyl. Bon Jovi is having fond memories big album covers and liner notes, which I miss too. But Steve Jobs didn’t kill that. Apple has been trying to do many things to bring back the liner notes, artwork, and extras to make albums more attractive. I think the biggest problem is that the quality of the material that makes up today’s albums is far worse than it used to be. Music industry people just lost the sense of quality. It has turned into “Get a hit song and record 8 other pieces of shit to fill out an album. Charge $18 for it.” It was the Music Business who lost its sense of providing a value proposition with albums. I note that they also killed the “single” during the same time frame, which only opened the doors for a Napster to come along in the internet era like a Robin Hood to poke all the King John record moguls in their collective eye. Bon Jovi doesn’t want to point at the real culprits because they helped make him rich, but it’s his buddies at the big record companies that killed the golden goose.
Talk about misplaced sentiment.
Why in the world would a generation from now, long for the days that never existed, in their mind? That’s just stupid.
I think barbecued ribs are magical, but I don’t long for a time when you had to slaughter a cow to get some!