Jon Bon Jovi Is Full Of Crap
Jenny Kulland just permanently un-friended me on Facebook.
Recently in The Register, Jon Bon Jovi was quoted in an interview saying, “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.” The quote immediately reeks of the same stuff as the other spewage common of 70′s and 80′s era artists who are still around today.
Reading further into the article is advised so you won’t hate on Jon Bon too much. The experience he’s really talking about here is that of a teenage kid traipsing down to the music store, dropping their hard-earned cash (at minimum wage, likely) on an album where they’ve only heard one song, or maybe none at all, then taking it home and experiencing the whole thing from end to end as an atomic unit.
It’s a story I’m very familiar with. I don’t even want to think about how much money I blew on music in high school. Today, when I listen to my old music, I insist on listening to it in album order, almost all the time. I can see Jonny Boy’s point here — even if you are paying for the music, there’s something from the experience that is lost by not experiencing the album as it was conceptualized by the artists who created it. I remember the first time I heard Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” album, cover to cover, at a friend’s house, when it was brand new. There’s something about the album as a whole, the way the songs are sequenced, that makes it better as a unit than the sum of the parts. My first comment to my friend was, “That album is going to be a classic.” Sure enough, over 20 years later I still listen to it all the time.
It isn’t that JBJ is wrong about what the experience has lost. It’s that his blame is misplaced. It isn’t Steve Jobs’ fault. It is the music industry’s fault.
Back in the late 70′s to about the mid 80′s, bands formed organically. Guys (girls too, sometimes) like Eddie Van Halen would spend every waking moment teaching themselves to play their brother’s electric guitar while he was delivering newspapers. They would form garage bands, then the more serious of them would form backyard party bands, and maybe start performing on the Sunset Strip, where one night Gene Simmons or someone like that might be in the audience and would offer to help them get recorded. They would scrounge all the money together they could and record an album. They’d send it off to a label who would agree to distribute it. Only after an album was successful (or sometimes more than one) would they get a contract with a label. All this time they’d written their own songs, often for years before they ever performed at the Whiskey A Go-Go. They already knew which ones were popular, which ones sounded right, before they ever stepped into the studio.
Sometime in the 80′s, someone had a boneheaded idea: ”Hey, why require artists to actually go through all of that? We could short-circuit the whole process by hiring songwriters, hiring studio musicians to record, and holding auditions for attractive people who know how to sing!” Before you knew it, people who had not gone through the wringer were getting record deals too. But since the “artists” weren’t doing all the work anymore, the labels were keeping all the money and writing entirely self-serving contracts. This made things that much worse for the organic bands, who didn’t deserve to be treated like their music-of-mass-production counterparts.
Before long, you had entire albums filled up mostly with filler garbage but featuring a couple of popular singles. People would go purchase the album, as Bon Jovi described above, but be pretty disappointed with the album as a whole even if they liked the singles okay. In addition, they found that even though the singles were catchy enough to get them to buy the album, they lacked substance and got old quickly.
In other words, there was a clear shift from albums as a collection of art to albums as an assemblage of mostly trash with some items disguised as art, but lacking in the depth and substance to truly become art. Yet the music industry was charging just as much for these new-age albums as they used to charge for the classics-in-infancy.
It was around this time, the late 80′s into the 90′s, where I and most of my friends began saying, “I sure wish there was a way to just pay for the songs I want.”
So, Jon, don’t blame Steve Jobs. If you want to blame someone, blame Tiffany. She’s one of the first I remember that followed this formula which ultimately doomed the rest of you.
