AC/DC finally being won over to the iTunes Store is important progress, but much more important will be more digital services which get young music fans on the music spending ladder.

For sake of impartiality I have to apply the same rule to AC/DC, who matter much more to my generation than to the Digital Natives. The Beatles were a big coup but they mattered much more to Steve Job’s generation than to tweens and teenagers. The Digital Natives who currently just aren’t spending money on music. They are not what matters to the generation of young music fans that the music industry really needs to win over with (paid) digital services. The point I was making was that the Beatles, as important as they are both creatively and commercially, are part of the past. I found myself the subject of torrents of abuse from Beatles fans (for entertainment’s sake you can see the comments here). The Importance of Not Getting too Hung Up on Yesterday’s Starsīack when the Beatles were finally licensed to the iTunes Store I went on record as saying it wasn’t actually a big deal for the digital music market. After all it took a decade for AC/DC to be won over by iTunes. Streaming will ultimately hone its model and win over the doubters but it will be a slow and steady process. The paid download might feel like the embodiment of security and safeness now, but back in the early noughties it struck terror into the hearts of many music industry executives who, rightly as it transpired, feared that it would result in consumers hacking away at albums to skip to the singles. The same fear of the unknown that once afflicted iTunes now tars Spotify, Deezer, Rdio et al. Thus Spotify has a sizeable body of holdouts, including AC/DC. By contrast streaming services such as Spotify are at a much earlier stage of their evolution and their FUD Factor is high.

But streaming is still a step too far.

Its FUD Factor (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) has largely diminished. iTunes is no longer the scary unknown quantity it once was. Over the subsequent years most of those holdouts have come on board. When Apple first launched the iTunes Music Store there were plenty of high profile holdouts, the most significant of which being the Beatles.

The digital hold outs are being won over by downloads.But there are a couple of important factors here: Having grown up listening to AC/DC and playing Angus Young riffs such as the seminal ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ in my high school heavy metal band, my level of interest in this announcement is perhaps a little biased. This week Apple and Colombia announced the arrival of another big digital holdout to the iTunes Store: AC/DC.

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