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In the wake of Steve Jobs’ passing, there have been an awful lot of tributes to the genius who gave the world a staggering amount of technological gadgets that we didn’t know we needed until we had them.

But the Who guitarist Pete Townshend won’t be casting  vote for Jobs’ sainthood; he recently declared iTunes “a digital vampire” that ultimately hurts musicians.

During a lecture at Britain’s 2011 Radio Festival earlier this week, Townshend threw out fighting words about a whole bevy of music industry-related issues, including iTunes, one of Jobs’ most influential creations. He referred to the music store as a “digital vampire,” gradually bleeding musicians dry by taking a cut of every download sold on the site.

His comments about Jobs seemed especially mixed; while he at one point referred to him as “one of the coolest guys on the planet,” he also admitted that he once “wanted to cut his balls off,” though that was all under the guise of Townshend’s “inner artist,” which made frequent appearances throughout the speech.

The central idea that concerns Townshend is a solid one — fundamentally, that artists should be compensated for their work no matter what the means of distribution are. “Whether the public listen or not, creative writers and musicians should get paid if their work generates money by virtue of its mere existence on radio, television, YouTube, Facebook or SoundCloud,” he explained. “If someone pretends to be me, or pretends that something I have created should be available to them free (because creativity has less value than an hour’s work by me as a musician in a pub) I wonder what has gone wrong with human morality and social justice.” READ FULL STORY »