Well unsurprisingly, even after several minutes of Google searching I’m unable to dig into the real article on this one, only countless verbatim reposts on countless web-scraping sites.
Anyway, here’s an example. I don’t hate on Jon Bon Jovi, but I do hate on the misrepresentation of facts. Steve Jobs didn’t kill the music industry, the music industry killed the music industry. Here’s how.
Some time in the early 80s record companies and stereo manufacturers (then known as HiFi) found themselves with a problem. Record sales and HiFi sales were both flat. The somewhat endless parade of new media formats, the same on that continues today with Blueray, had not found a new winner in a while. People were still buying vinyl and cassettes.
It was at an AES convention that the CD was introduced to the world for the sole purpose of reviving back catalog and HiFi sales. “But it sounds like a turd” was the general consensus among the crowd of professional audio engineers at AES. Analog to digital conversion was in it’s infancy and most early CDs sounded really brittle and really thin compared to their vinyl counterparts. Sound familiar? Anyway, because marketing is often more powerful than the truth especially when aimed at teenagers, the record companies got to work. “It’s a perfect copy”, “It’ll never wear out” was the message and it worked like a charm. By the late 80s the CD was the dominant format and back catalog sales were humming along.
Presumably nobody in marketing foresaw an age where digital information would be so easy to transfer, or more likely they figured by then it wouldn’t be their problem.
Not going to get all Lefsetz about Napster and the subsequent reaction from the industry, but suffice to say that it was all coming down anyway and Apple was the company that put together a new model for distribution of a medium that was inevitable. They didn’t kill the music industry, you idiot. You really think people would still be driving to Tower records to pick up this shit?