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iTunes: End of an Era
Jun. 2nd, 2019 11:57 amApple 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.