Steve Jobs Wants Me For a Sunbeam

The New York Times says "the album is dead."

Mind you, Vanity Fair proclaimed irony dead after 9/11 and that ended up becoming more prevalent and intolerable.

So listeners have become so blase about the oversaturation of available music that they will now give a similar lack of a shit about degraded audio becoming the de riguer form of enjoying songs? MP3's are so convenient...and as with so many things preferable due to their accessibility and expedience, they're half-assed at their best. Lossy audio formats are unacceptable in the live trading community, so why should they be fine and dandy for actual studio recordings?

It's a disgusting turn of events, and I'm not sure who to be more enraged at, the rich-beyond-sanity motherfucks who still crave more bucks and thus take turns inventing/exploiting every gadget-based trend or the schlubbos who have no respect for art and artists. I'll be damned if I let any of them tell me how to listen. I check MP3s of new albums and if I like the album, I delete the MP3's and buy the actual CD. It sounds better, and I love having shelves of plastic cases. I love the physical experience of taking one and opening it, placing the disc in the player, and even checking out the booklet. Now, if I come across an album I've downloaded that only has a few good songs, will I burn those tracks in lieu of wasting my money? Yes. That's what downloading is good for...previewing someone's work to see if it's worth my cash.

If this causes artists to freak and try to make every song a single so people will listen...bye bye good music.

Time to take it back underground. Fuck the Applefied nation. I'm not dissing technology; I'm on the Internet too much to do that with a cara polo visage. But I'm sick of i-this and i-that. "May as well embrace it", I hear, "it's going to be the norm." Yeah thanks, Steve Jobs. Stop trying to convince me that the way I listen to music is outdated or even wrong. Think about the effects of treating art as a Pop-Tart.

Don't let music be relegated to the background of your life. Don't let hard-working musicians feel hopeless and desperate. Don't settle for 128 kps. Don't cling to the iPod like a security blanket. Take the time to love music.

Apple Steve Jobs