iTunes: End of an Era
Jun. 2nd, 2019 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficApple is closing iTunes and I'm immensely upset. I feel like Polaroid users must have--and like this is going to keep happening to me, as my preferred technology for music becomes more and more out of sync with the market.
It's not the iTunes program itself I'm going to miss, per se. It's kind of janky, and has a bunch of idiosyncratic things it does when I sync with my devices that I've never been able to fix. For example--I have a number of tracks that aren't on Apple's music servers, and every now and then, iTunes will remove these from my playlists. Not my library--just the playlists.
Apple will be developing a new program to manage music and devices, which I can hope will work better. And I can save my playlists in a number of formats, including text. So worse comes to worse, I spend a day or two manually reconstructing them in a new format (I've done it before, I can do it again).
I also find myself weirdly glad that I've already gone through the grief of losing the iPod Classic, as losing iTunes would brick it.
The thing that worries me is the more generally trend--I like to own my music. CD sales have fallen 80% in the last decade, and downloads have fallen 56%. iTunes closing reflects that. I never bought from iTunes, as (at least back in the day--haven't checked in a long time) iTunes purchases came with DRM, and I like my music without little handcuffs on it. I buy my downloads from Amazon, but now I feel like I'm one bad day for Jeff Bezos from losing that as well.
The reason I want to own my music instead of rent it is twofold:
1) I don't want to listen to random music. I hate randomize. I've spent twenty years constructing playlists, and when I want to listen to a playlist, I want to listen to *that* playlist. I know the streaming services allow you to construct playlists, but I want complete control, which leads my second, bigger point:
2) Streaming is always subject to the whims of the legal system and the owners of the rights. I like a lot of music that has fallen through the cracks. I love a couple of tracks by the Tarney Spencer Band, a group that had one record in Australia in 1980 and was never digitized. I bought the LP on eBay and digitized it myself. Streaming does not have this.
The idea of losing forever access to music that is important to me is horrifying. I do not want media corporations to have the power to make my access to music temporary, or to be able to erase parts of our culture.
I have been fighting this trend since it started--when people digitized music and ditched their CDs, I kept all of mine. When people uploaded their personal collections to the cloud, I did not. Which meant that when all the major services discontinued their cloud hosting of personal collections, I lost nothing. So now, as anxious as I am about my future ability to acquire new music and continue to play what I have, I'm trying to reassure myself that I still own all the music that I own.
In a few years when they stop making CDs, I'm going to be the person who buys five CD drives and keeps them in bubble wrap.
I literally couldn't sleep last night, thinking about how there will come a time where I can't control my music the way I want to. Just another reminder that being part of a global system that only delivers goods and services as long as there is enough market demand sucks sometimes.
It's not the iTunes program itself I'm going to miss, per se. It's kind of janky, and has a bunch of idiosyncratic things it does when I sync with my devices that I've never been able to fix. For example--I have a number of tracks that aren't on Apple's music servers, and every now and then, iTunes will remove these from my playlists. Not my library--just the playlists.
Apple will be developing a new program to manage music and devices, which I can hope will work better. And I can save my playlists in a number of formats, including text. So worse comes to worse, I spend a day or two manually reconstructing them in a new format (I've done it before, I can do it again).
I also find myself weirdly glad that I've already gone through the grief of losing the iPod Classic, as losing iTunes would brick it.
The thing that worries me is the more generally trend--I like to own my music. CD sales have fallen 80% in the last decade, and downloads have fallen 56%. iTunes closing reflects that. I never bought from iTunes, as (at least back in the day--haven't checked in a long time) iTunes purchases came with DRM, and I like my music without little handcuffs on it. I buy my downloads from Amazon, but now I feel like I'm one bad day for Jeff Bezos from losing that as well.
The reason I want to own my music instead of rent it is twofold:
1) I don't want to listen to random music. I hate randomize. I've spent twenty years constructing playlists, and when I want to listen to a playlist, I want to listen to *that* playlist. I know the streaming services allow you to construct playlists, but I want complete control, which leads my second, bigger point:
2) Streaming is always subject to the whims of the legal system and the owners of the rights. I like a lot of music that has fallen through the cracks. I love a couple of tracks by the Tarney Spencer Band, a group that had one record in Australia in 1980 and was never digitized. I bought the LP on eBay and digitized it myself. Streaming does not have this.
The idea of losing forever access to music that is important to me is horrifying. I do not want media corporations to have the power to make my access to music temporary, or to be able to erase parts of our culture.
I have been fighting this trend since it started--when people digitized music and ditched their CDs, I kept all of mine. When people uploaded their personal collections to the cloud, I did not. Which meant that when all the major services discontinued their cloud hosting of personal collections, I lost nothing. So now, as anxious as I am about my future ability to acquire new music and continue to play what I have, I'm trying to reassure myself that I still own all the music that I own.
In a few years when they stop making CDs, I'm going to be the person who buys five CD drives and keeps them in bubble wrap.
I literally couldn't sleep last night, thinking about how there will come a time where I can't control my music the way I want to. Just another reminder that being part of a global system that only delivers goods and services as long as there is enough market demand sucks sometimes.
Gen X vs Gen Z
Date: 2019-06-02 10:40 pm (UTC)But they don't feel like that. They want access and it feels less invested in a specific thing as much as in quantity access. Or maybe they haven't had too many moments yet where they're looking for a beloved series only to find out it's been pulled off the streaming service or want to watch a film and it's not for rent or even sale anywhere.
It feels like we've fallen off that cliff for music and film/TV in particular with books/audiobooks only a little behind and computer programs the last big one to come. I want to OWN a program--not rent it!
Re: Gen X vs Gen Z
Date: 2019-06-06 03:33 pm (UTC)I'm a Xenial--I get technically classified as a millennial (literally the first year) but in many ways, including this one, I am not a millennial. For me, the story of my college years into my twenties was the end of the era of media scarcity. There was a period where everything was coming out on DVD, where shows that I had bought bootleg tapes of off of eBay (like SeaQuest, and due South), were all getting released. And so it felt for awhile like everything would be, forever. Like this whole fan infrastructure of pirated VHS tapes and online swaps wasn't necessary anymore.
So I feel very betrayed in my thirties to find that is going away again. It's like the world gave me the exact thing I wanted (hoard all the digital content! Take it with you on a pocket device!) and now it's taking it away again.
In talking to my friends, I know this will not mean the end of my digital media collection. But it will mean going back to the world of bootlegs and piracy and jury-rigging devices to make them do what I want, and that sucks.
Like, I'm already getting paranoid about due South. The DVD release was shit. I have two copies, but DVDs don't last forever. And I'm not tech savvy enough to rip them, given the DRM. But there's going to be a point where I'll need to convert this stuff to digital formats to save it, cause I have no faith in media companies continuing to make things like due South available, and the one release of the DVD will just get older and older.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-02 11:24 pm (UTC)Variety also concurs that the announcement really announces an end to digital ownership which Apple championed for a long time. But I can see why music companies would prefer this model, especially when combined with an increasingly tech illiterate public.
The idea of losing forever access to music that is important to me is horrifying. I do not want media corporations to have the power to make my access to music temporary, or to be able to erase parts of our culture.
It's a real concern. I would add to your list of reasons that I already own a large enough collection that I rarely hear all of it.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-06 03:36 pm (UTC)I don't listen to all of that, obviously. But I have several times had the experience of rediscovering something in my own collection and growing to love it. I spend a lot of time curating my collection, which I enjoy doing. And the most obscure stuff is usually the most important to me--like my recordings of my own concerts, or the obscure Australian band my dad rocked me to as a baby.
Buddha said attachment leads to suffering. He was not wrong.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-06 10:35 pm (UTC)Yeah, there is a ton of stuff in film, TV, and music that has never been digitized, or even released on disc, and probably never will.