U2’s Bono once sang “Is it getting better?” in the song “One.” Often with big changes in technology, I often hear that musical refrain off in the distance — well, in my mind at least. Today, news got out that Apple is going to retire the iTunes platform. What will replace it? Stand-alone apps for various audio and visual media. This may be a long overdue change, but one has to wonder if the new apps will be better than what came before. Despite all the hype, technological innovations often have retrograde elements to them. You may think things are getting better, but often they are just getting more convenient.
It may be difficult to believe, but iTunes made its debut on January 9, 2001. The popularity of mp3 as an audio format in the late ’90s made stealing music a breeze. Napster had been disrupting the music industry since launching in 1999 — which is roughly the time all those high-priced CDs the music industry charged us consumers essentially became free with file sharing. To its credit, Apple found a more user-friendly way to both organize one’s CD collection, and buy mp3s from the music labels for 99 cents a song. I’m sure more than one person in the music industry was asking Steve Jobs as he was pitching the iTunes store: “How do we compete against free?” The answer is you really can’t. But you can make it very easy for people to buy music without having to learn how to use Napster, and import their music libraries so they can make custom playlists and CDs for personal use. You’ll also need some cool marketing with a catchy slogan like: “Rip. Mix. Burn.” Get people excited about new musical lexicons, new music formats, and new devices to play them on (the first iPod came out in October 2001).
While it’s true you can’t completely eradicate “free,” it is also true that you can sell the idea of freedom through the purchase of a device (car companies do it all the time in their advertisements). With the first generation iPod, freedom was the ability to have a thousand songs in your pocket. One was now liberated from a desktop computer and could take a ton of music on walks, jogs, the bus, trains, planes, a library…wherever. It’s your world, right? And iTunes? Well, that’s the beauty of it. You now have a place to store all that music you collected on CD in the ’80s and ’90s. But more than that, you have the freedom to mix it any way you want. You can load your playlist on your iPod, or burn CDs to play in your car or at home. Add to that, you have Apple’s default AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format that had less compression than mp3s. In other words, it sounds better.
But did it get better? Mp3 is a horrible format. Ripping/importing CDs into iTunes took a somewhat derided format (i.e., CDs — for being too shrill), and compressed the hell out of the files to make them take up less space on your iPod. If you ever did a side-by-side comparison of a CD vs mp3 playback, you know how much of that fullness of sound was lost in the conversion to mp3. Apple engineers tried to compensate for crappy mp3 sound with the headphones — in order to make it an acceptable listening experience to the user. Another truism: most people think “good enough” is sometimes better when it comes to audio quality.
But what about iTunes? Did that get better? Well, over the decades, Apple added more features to the software that it became this bloated thing. In addition to music, the iTunes store sold and rented movies, TV shows, you could purchase books to read on your iPad, and there were podcasts that could be added to your iPod (just plug and sync). Then Apple Music started, and the company got into streaming music like Spotify, and play curated recorded music live from a studio with DJs, like radio. For those who got tired of syncing their phones with iTunes, Apple Music “matched” the music on your library so it could be streamed. You could still create playlists, but now that fewer and fewer people bothered with CDs, playlists could “live” in the cloud and could be accessed anywhere with Apple devices (the most popular, of course, is the iPhone). So, while all this was evolving, I’m sure Apple realized that people weren’t using iTunes all that much anymore. Why keep something that is falling out of favor if you want to be a multimedia company that’s part of the present and the future? So, rightly or wrongly, iTunes is set to die. Its replacement will probably have elements that look like the old iTunes — but tailored for mobile devices.
So, is it getting better? I suppose when a music player like iTunes gets so swollen with features that it feels busy and overwhelming, you have a problem with users. Why put all that effort and money into revising a product if users are only using a small part of it? It’s better to find what features users use the most, then bust up the old order and create a new one that seems new, convenient, and relevant. In reality, though, Apple Music (the successor to iTunes) is still a music player that streams crappy mp3s for (mostly) mobile devices. Not much has changed on that front. It’s the outward facing interface that looks shiny and new, but underneath the hood, it’s kind of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
