AC/DC: "iTunes is going to kill music"

AC/DC's Black Ice available 19 October - not on iTunes
AC/DC's Black Ice available 19 October - not on iTunes

It's been well-documented that Ozzie rock granddads AC/DC have snubbed Apple's iTunes Store in their latest bid for music supremacy, by not allowing the Store to stock their latest album Black Ice in digital form.

But the long-in-the-tooth rockers showed off their Luddite nature even more this week, when, in an interview with Reuters, they warned that iTunes could well be the death of music as we know it.

"Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but this iTunes, God bless 'em, it's going to kill music if they're not careful," said lead singer Brian Johnson.

He continued: "It just worries me. And I'm sure they're just doing it all in the interest of making as much...cash as possible. Let's put it this way, it's certainly not for the...love, let's get that out of the way, right away."

Black (market) Ice

His iTunes rant comes just days before the release of AC/DC's first album in eight years, Black Ice, which will only be sold in CD form.

Despite the lack of electronic release, however, MusicRadar is reporting that the return-to-form album has already been downloaded 40,000 times.

Where there's a will – or in this case, a BitTorrent – there's a way.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.