iTunes was once the most popular place to browse, buy, and listen to music.
But that was about 15 years ago, and a lot has changed since then.
In fact, many people today consider iTunes to be a bloated, slow, bug-infested application
that’s become the victim of its own success.
So what exactly happened to iTunes?
Well, in order to answer this question, we have to go back to before iTunes ever existed.
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Before the iTunes Music Store was around, major record labels were having a huge problem
with piracy.
People were ripping music from CDs and sharing digital song files to every corner of the
globe by using peer-to-peer file sharing applications like Napster.
But most people weren’t pirating music because they were criminals, they were pirating music
because there was no other way to download digital song files in those days.
There was no digital music marketplace.
If you wanted the latest single from Eminem or Beyonce, you’d have to make a trip to
your local record store and spend fifteen or twenty dollars to buy the entire album.
Even if that single was the only song you wanted.
So you can imagine the appeal of hopping on Napster and downloading individual songs for
free from the comfort of your own home, even if it was technically illegal.
And because things like the internet and the iPod grew in popularity so quickly, so did
digital music piracy, and it caught record labels off guard.
Their initial approach to combat piracy was to make examples out of the worst file-sharers.
They did this by taking legal action and threatening the same treatment to any other pirate.
But this warning fell on deaf ears since it just wasn’t possible to prosecute hundreds
of thousands of Napster users.
So then they got another idea, what if music could be copy-protected so that it wouldn’t
be possible to rip CDs in the first place?
But before the music industry could follow through with that plan, they were approached
by Steve Jobs, who introduced a completely new way to combat music piracy.
The concept was that you can’t stop people from pirating music, but you can discourage
it by offering an easier, more convenient way to find and download digital music at
a reasonable price.
And looking back, this approach seemed obvious, but it was actually pretty radical.
And initially, many record label executives refused to cooperate, since they believed
Apple would be the only company benefitting from the deal.
Labels were afraid of losing even more of their dwindling revenue by selling songs individually
for ninety-nine cents, rather than selling albums for fifteen or twenty dollars.
So to help persuade record labels to give the iTunes Music Store a chance, Apple made
it available only on the Mac.
That way the concept could be tested with a smaller audience and would cause very little
damage to the music industry if it failed.
But as we all know, that wasn’t the case at all.
When the iTunes Music Store launched, it was an instant success, selling one million music
downloads in its first week, despite only being available to Mac users.
Five months later Apple would release a Windows version of the iTunes Store, which led to
the company’s domination of the digital music marketplace.
And despite drawbacks of iTunes, like purchased songs only being compatible with Apple devices,
it proved to be the biggest player in digital music sales year after year.
But this is when things started to take a turn for the worst.
As iTunes grew in popularity, it adopted new features and functionality that contributed
to the application becoming bloated.
Because what started as a music jukebox and digital music marketplace, eventually became
an iPod management program, a podcasting client, a video and software marketplace, an iPhone
administration tool, a social network, and a music streaming service, all rolled into
one.
There were many people who warned Apple that giving iTunes too much functionality could
result in a complex and convoluted application, but their words were ignored.
For example, just a few days before the original iPhone was introduced in 2007, Pete Mortensen
with Wired published an article predicting Apple would create an application for the
sole purpose of handling data transfers between the upcoming iPhone and a computer.
Because remember, back in those days, you couldn’t simply set up an iPhone on its
own.
You had to activate it by connecting to a computer with iTunes and sync all your data
between the two through a USB cable.
And Mortensen figured Apple would create a dedicated application to handle the syncing
process, kind’ve like what iCloud does today, except on your computer instead of a remote
server.
Mortensen said, “Imagine a single, lightweight application focused solely on data transfers
and media previews.
As you initiate a sync, it detects all the new data on your phone and launches transfer-only
versions of the iLife apps needed to work with them.
All your podcasts get instantly loaded.
Your photos are imported, sorted and posted to your website.
Just hit OK and watch it go.”
But that wasn’t what Apple had in mind.
Instead, they gave iTunes the responsibility of syncing data, and this resulted in an endless
amount of bugs and complications that plagued the iTunes syncing process for years.
Here are just a few examples, iTunes getting stuck on the “Waiting for items to copy”
step, iTunes not syncing album art correctly, iTunes wifi sync not working for iOS users,
iTunes 12 crashing while syncing apps, iTunes thinking that a device’s storage is full
when it really isn’t, and a host of unknown error messages that were notoriously difficult
to solve.
And matters were only made worse in 2010 when Apple decided the iPad should also sync with
iTunes.
At that point, iTunes was responsible for syncing contacts, calendar events, Safari
bookmarks, notes, email accounts, iWork documents, music, tv shows, movies, podcasts, books,
ringtones, photos, and more.
Keep in mind, this functionality was on top of everything iTunes had already been responsible
for, and the bloat showed no signs of slowing down.
Shortly after the additional iPad support, Apple introduced a new layer to iTunes called
Ping.
Now you may not be familiar with Ping since it only lasted two years, but it was a music-oriented
social networking service intended to help users share and discover new music with friends.
But it faced difficulties from day one.
Apple hadn’t received permission to include Facebook integration despite that being one
of its headlining features, spam links were a persistent issue since Apple didn’t set
up any content filters, and fake artist accounts were created by scammers to bait users.
So in short, Ping was a complete failure.
And thankfully was removed from iTunes in 2012.
But Ping proved just how unrestrained Apple was in loading up iTunes with even more features
rather than offering a faster, simpler, more manageable application.
Now by 2011 users finally received a synchronization service from Apple that worked as advertised,
and it was called iCloud.
I’m sure you’ve heard of it, since it’s the most successful cloud-based service Apple
has ever offered.
But iCloud suffered from technical issues thanks to a feature called iTunes Match, later
renamed iCloud Music Library.
You see, the feature was supposed to scan a users iTunes music library, including tracks
copied from CDs, and match them to higher quality lossless tracks in the iTunes Store.
Then it would upload all those tracks to iCloud so the user could access their music library
from any device.
It sounded great in theory, but caused absolute havoc when people started using iTunes Match
for themselves.
Here’s one users experience from a Cult Of Mac article by Rob LeFebvre, “Discussions
user Tuff Ghost explains that everything was fine with his 13,000 song iTunes library,
until he installed iTunes 12.2 on his Mac and allowed it to enable iCloud Music Library.
“All of the sudden it starts overwriting my album art with completely wrong art (example:
Weezer showed art for a Radiohead album) on both my iMac AND my iPhone, screwing up metadata
by putting random songs in albums where they didn’t belong (there was a Cursive album
where the first track was listed as a Foo Fighters song).”
When he clicked to listen to a song, it would play a completely different one, like the
metadata for the files was completely incorrect.”
This left many people struggling to recover their original iTunes libraries and advising
others to never enable iCloud Music Library in the first place.
In the early 2000’s iTunes revolutionized the way people purchased and managed music,
but almost a decade after its introduction, the market began to change once again.
Except this time, Apple wasn’t leading the revolution.
Instead, it was a Swedish company called Spotify who helped usher in the music streaming era.
They brought their service to the US in 2011 and as you can see from this graph, iTunes
music sales began to decline just two years later.
It turned out users were comfortable renting music for a monthly fee since it came with
incredible advantages.
Like the convenience of listening to any song in the service’s catalog from any device,
without taking up any storage space.
And as Spotify exploded in popularity, Apple knew they needed to offer a music streaming
service of their own.
But this left many people to speculate how exactly Apple would implement their service.
Many assumed the company would give it a dedicated app separate from iTunes.
But similar to the iPhone syncing scenario, Apple decided to squeeze their entire music
streaming service into an already overstuffed iTunes.
Here’s what Micah Singleton with The Verge had to say about it in 2015, “On the desktop,
Apple decided against building a stand-alone app and instead shoved Apple Music into iTunes
— it’s less than stellar.
Nobody likes using iTunes.
For the last 15 years iTunes has been a necessary evil if you wanted to have music locally stored
in halfway decent fashion on your computer, and now that it’s integrated with Apple
Music, there is no escaping iTunes.”
And because of this tight integration with iTunes, users began experiencing headaches
while trying to do things like downloading tracks for offline listening.
Because that feature required iCloud Music Library to be turn on, and some users who
did had their libraries completely ruined.
Proving that Apple still hadn’t solved the issues with iCloud Music Library, formerly
known as iTunes Match, since its release four years earlier.
And this isn’t even considering how cumbersome and slow Apple Music is largely due to it
being integrated into iTunes.
Singleton also touched on this in his review of the service, “Apple Music on the desktop
is slow and heavy, and has more than a few times refused to stream music for me.
If you want to put a song or album from Apple Music on repeat, you have to go on a scavenger
hunt through the menu bar, and it may or may not work.
iTunes feels like it was built for the last generation of apps.
Spotify’s desktop app is nothing to write home about, but it feels much snappier and
lighter than iTunes ever has.”
And I think that’s a major reason why many users, myself included, prefer using Spotify
over Apple Music.
It feels faster, more intuitive, and keeps track of music playback between my Apple products.
So I can continue listening to a song on my iPhone that I started on my Mac.
Something that Apple’s own streaming service still doesn’t do.
And this has left many users clamoring for a dedicated Apple Music app built from the
ground up with an emphasis on performance and continuity between devices.
Rather than a music service bogged down by the mess that iTunes has become.
Today iTunes is a bloated resource hog that many users would rather avoid.
And with the popularity of music streaming at its peak, many are wondering what the future
of iTunes might be.
Or if it has a future at all.
There are already rumors of Apple announcing the shut down of their iTunes Music Store
by the end of this month, and that could give the company an opportunity to go back to the
drawing board and reimagine their approach to music management.
Perhaps introducing a new Music application, or a completely revolutionized version of
iTunes.
But either way, I think we can all agree that Apple needs to make some drastic changes to
salvage iTunes legacy.
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