iTunes is dead. Long live iTunes. 2023 was the official year of his death, in favor of the Music app. It is still installed on thousands of Mac and Windows computers, many computers with macOS Catalina currently browsing Applesfera and I used it yesterday to transfer live streams to my iPod Classic. But, for practical reasons, it no longer exists for the company itself.
Thus ends an era that began on January 9, 2001., in the middle of the afternoon. Outside the MacWorld Expo pavilion, it was raining and windy. Steve Jobs took the stage in his usual black sweater, sat down at a desk next to a PowerMac G4, and started playing music. A phrase in the air: “A musical revolution is happening right now.”
a musical revolution
It is said that it was iTunes — and the iPod by extension — that sparked the beginning of the end, the bonfire that killed music. And I won’t deny the biggest, it was a tool that many used as a pulley to encourage hacking. But that’s like saying that street markets encourage the theft of oranges: Apple-made devices and apps, not shoplifting techniques.
Steve Jobs spoke on this day in 2001 about the complexity of playing music, copying music and sharing music. “We were late to that party,” he finally admitted. On the contrary: the rules of the game did not change until iTunes entered the market. That same year, On October 23, 2001, iTunes 2 would arrive sponsoring the first iPod with 5 GB of storage and headphones in the same box. 5GB is a lot of songs even in WAV format. In an average quality MP3, there were then about 1,000 to 1,500 songs. Complete discographies.
iTunes 3 raised the playlists and audiobook stands – yes, Audible.com has made a career out of it. But it wasn’t until iTunes 4 that the revolution came, the Music Store with support for more music formats, and a few months later with a native app for Windows that shook the shins of more conservative fans. We have already spoken about records several times: iTunes Music Store sold 1 million songs in 5 days.
iTunes and privateers
Napster, Soulseek and many other platforms have agreed. The copy-share parade has begun. In 2004, iTunes was the most popular music store on the planet. Forget Picadilly Records, House of Oldies or Space Hall in Berlin: iTunes already had 85 million songs in its catalog. Meanwhile, in troubled waters, fishermen win: iPod shuffle, nano, touch…
Like in his day he already had the Sony Walkman and Discman, now a smaller, colorful and cool device let you compose the soundtrack of your moments. Party Shuffle was Spotify’s Party Mix a decade before Spotify. Innovations have slowed down a few pistons: iTunes 7 was the oldest and was accompanied by new features as elegant as Cover Flow or this filtering by dozens of taxonomies which continues to be the Holy Grail for metadata lovers.
And, speaking of metadata, you can already imagine the rest. Apple did its part with the FairPlay technology – radically monopolistic, on the other hand – but things didn’t go well. The music industry was uneasy. Trials have started. Copy protections were insufficient. iTunes and these iThings were upsetting the “harmony” of RealNetworks, its direct rivals, which had bought Rhapsody —and would eventually buy Napster many years later— to compete with Apple’s unstoppable expansion into this market.
Jobs, as calm as usual, expressed his point of view. The one that could be summed up in that it is impossible to put doors on the ground, that with more restrictions, less income, that there will always be a way to violate DRM protections and that CDs are already sold DRM-free — “The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and can be played on any player that supports open formats.” His open letter, entitled “Reflections on music”, further fueled the powder keg.
a generation victim halo effect
A whole generation, however, we continue to enjoy tons of music, more than ever, without spending a fortune in thrift stores. Many musicians have called these iPods “electronic trash that killed the art”. If we’re getting critical, there’s no equalizer worth having: the quality of iTunes as an MP3 player was quite questionable, and the quality of the MP3 format itself left a lot to be desired – something that FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless Enconder and many more would fix- .
With the rise of the iPhone, iTunes has become one of the last priorities. Every blanket that’s been erased and little disturbance in the lateral bar caused an earthquake in the community. But in the end, the path was marked: in 2011 came iTunes Match, Apple’s first “cloud music library”. The seed of the first fully connected iTunes, full of online radio stations and an on-demand catalog. Music, now a daily ornament, a decorative musical thread, would never be the same again. Except that it is, basically: I still use iTunes like day one.
Even calling iTunes a fiasco, as a user I owe it thousands of hours of enjoyment, while the ‘Visualizer’, the only live wallpaper capable of rivaling the skins of Winamp, I sometimes had performance hangs on my first MacBook.
Consider, for example, that Jobs’ concern with slow file transfers was the origin of the FireWire interface. iTunes was gobbling up the services around it — until it becomes the ultimate key, the toll from which to sync the entire Apple ecosystem — to finally die as a white dwarf, consuming its last kilotons of energy to specialize in “Music”. As simple as that. The musical revolution has happened again. It’s all that matters.
