The Who's Townshend: Apple's a 'digital vampire'

This morning at Starbucks, I saw a thin man wearing shades, but in front of those he also had a pair of bi-focals perched on his nose.

Somehow, this reminded me of the Who's Pete Townshend. This must have been fate, as Townshend is today making news after railing yesterday against the blood-sucking tendencies of Apple.

The BBC tells me that the man who created the windmill, a signature guitar move copied by so many desperate, drunken youths, declared that Apple is "like a digital vampire."

He seems to feel that Apple is sucking blood out of artists without offering any form of transfusion.

"Is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west Internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can't provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire... for its enormous commission?" he asked in a speech in Salford, England.

The services he referred to are things like creative editorial direction, general nurturing of careers and cut-price cocaine.

No, no. That last one is a mere rumor.

I am sure, though, that many will want to help Townshend search for reasons why Apple isn't an artist's Epstein or McLaren. One might be money. Perhaps, in the eyes of Apple, this would be like asking record stores in the 70s to give artists creative guidance.

Perhaps, too, there lingers a certain disdain for the way record companies for so long milked artists till all that was left was rancid cheese.

However, Townshend insisted that Apple should hire 20 talent scouts from "the dying record business."

These talent scouts would presumably attempt to guide artists through a world in which music is far more disposable than when Townshend was at his height and where listeners skip from one artist to another like Don Juan skipped from Marie-Claire to Anne-Marie.

Once Townshend warmed to his theme, he went after file sharers. He said they "may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it."

One imagines this is quite a good bike, as Townshend was at least honest enough to concede that he has done extremely well from the music business and, indeed, from iTunes.

His words, though, do come at a time when artists are increasingly demurring on the absolute benefits of the download and streaming world.

As CNET's Greg Sandoval first revealed, Coldplay is refusing to allow its new album on Spotify and other streaming services.

But this is all merely multi-millionaires fighting over additional millions.

The bigger issue is surely that technology, by making so many things easy and ubiquitous, downgrades their value. It allows people to cherry pick songs, to park them in a library of tens of thousands and to treat them as if they are nothing more than the Muzak of their narcissistic lives.

Of course one can blame Apple and iTunes' sharkish 30% commission. But sometimes it's worth looking in the mirror and seeing what song comes into one's head.

For most of today's music buyers, it just might be pieces such as "I'm Free" and "Won't Get Fooled Again."