What iTunes needs next
Apple's venerable iTunes Store has been around for 10 years, but here's what it needs to make it through another 10.
The iTunes Store
is 10 years old -- and iTunes, even older -- and it often feels like it.
Apple has certainly gone through some efforts to make
iTunes
look and feel different, but it's the load that iTunes bears that's the
real problem. Once upon a time, iTunes was made to work with an
iPod . The setup was simple; the software was good. It held MP3s and acted as the bridge.
Then
a music store was added. Then, videos. And audiobooks. Now, apps. What
started as a simple software-to-hardware relationship became the
necessary portal for all software on and off an iPod, or the
far-more-advanced iPhone, iPod Touch, and
iPad . iTunes handled document side-loading and software backups.
iTunes has officially hit overload.
Today, it's not that iTunes doesn't work; it just doesn't do anything extremely well. In fact,
I avoid it when possible .
iTunes 11 made good strides in cleaning up the older look of the
software and decluttering things, but the fundamental role of iTunes --
and what it does -- remains largely the same.
Can iTunes win my
love back...and yours, too? The key lies in iTunes smartly addressing
what music- and media-playing feels like in 2013: mobile, cloud-based,
and multidevice. iTunes needs to be simple, lean, and helpful. And it
needs to do things on a computer that might not seem all that exciting
but are important for media libraries we care about: heavy lifting.
iTunes should just be for music and media iPods, iPhones,
and iPads used to need iTunes to set up and install all files. That's no
longer true: iOS devices can now be set up and used without ever coming
in contact with iTunes on a computer (although, for getting photos and
videos on and off, you'll probably still want that computer). Yet,
iTunes remains burdened, perhaps overloaded, with the job of syncing and
locally backing up these iGadgets.
On your iPhone or iPad, the
iTunes Store and App Store are separate. So it should be on Macs and
PCs, too. Managing apps, documents, and backups is enough of a job for a
standalone piece of software, especially since many homes now have a
fair handful of iOS devices to deal with. I don't care whether iOS
device management gets folded into the
Mac App Store, or becomes a third standalone application -- it just needs to go somewhere else.
This would let iTunes take a breather and just focus on tunes. And media.
iTunes in the future: Cloud first, local second
But iTunes, as a media-management software, needs to be savvier, too.
There's another reason I stopped using iTunes to manage my iOS music:
you're restricted to syncing with one computer's library, and getting
new music away from your computer becomes a huge pain.
Whether
you're streaming via an app like Pandora or Spotify, or using a
third-party cloud music service like Amazon Cloud Player, getting files
on and off your device happens on your phone; nothing else is required.
To expect anything else is absurd in 2013, especially with how powerful
smartphones and tablets have become.
iTunes Match, Apple's own
cloud music-streaming and download service, solves some of these issues.
But not all of them. I've switched to iTunes Match and stream songs
directly from my cloud library, but iTunes Match costs money to
subscribe: $25 a year. That's not a lot, but unlike iCloud, there's no
starter-pack "free" option.
iTunes Match has clear advantages: it
works more fluidly across computers that have a shared Apple ID, as
opposed to iTunes' one-music-library-syncing philosophy on local music.
This is the way it should be. If you want to find purchased music, you
now have to dig into submenus on your iOS app to find that music and
redownload it.
iTunes Match-like easy-to-browse cloud music
delivery should be free for any purchased iTunes media, with a charge
for the matching service and any content you upload yourself.
iTunes needs to be a better file-management program
iTunes works, except when it doesn't. Syncing my entire 15,000-song
music library with iTunes Match took a while, but now it's all available
to me at a moment's notice...mostly. There are songs with missing
parts, mislabeled tracks, and other oddities, and some tracks remain
grayed out, not having uploaded at all. Some of these problems were
errors in my music library, but the problem with iTunes Match is that it
doesn't let you easily discover and fix problems. It's not a viewable
"locker" like Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music are. What this means
is, I leave my broken music alone, because it's too annoying to fix.
Amazon
and Google have cloud-based services, but they don't do a phenomenal
job of managing actual music and media files on a computer. iTunes has
an advantage there, but iTunes as an actual program for file management
leaves a lot to be desired. iTunes doesn't help clean your library
easily. Duplicate tracks can be spotted, but eliminating them isn't as
effortless as with certain third-party solutions. Errors with song files
aren't identified and fixed. For someone like me, with a decade of
digital music accumulated, iTunes should be more helpful with keeping my
cabinets organized.
There's value in this type of unsexy
service. We have to keep our media somewhere, and having a local backup
is a very smart idea. If computers are like trucks, iTunes on a computer
should be more of an inventory/database service than a killer music
player. Sure, we might play music on a computer via iTunes, but those
days are diminishing. Music is becoming the domain of mobile devices.
Music playback on a personal computer is a secondary service.
Most
people I know don't go to iTunes that often on their computers. iTunes
needs to be more of a storage facility than a music player, and be an
excellent, clearly organized one that syncs and backs up from the cloud.
Make free streaming content easier to find Apple has
had a trend lately of offering some awfully good free streaming content.
David Bowie and Justin Timberlake, among others, streamed their full
albums on iTunes weeks before release. You had to browse the iTunes
Store and play from the artist page, however, which most people didn't
even realize.
Instead, why not have a pop-out pane that can show
the music-du-jour that's free to stream? Maybe that's the eventual aim
for an iRadio service, but rather than the failed music-discovery
approach of Ping, offering clear and valuable music content that's easy
to find feels like an obvious win for all involved.
Keep being simple
A lot of improvements were made to iTunes 11: a cleaner design and
stripped-down look is the right direction. But the back-end functions of
iTunes need to be strong. And from here on in, the cloud matters more
for media playback than ever before. Apple's philosophy of simplicity is
the right one. Maybe it's just a different set of features that need to
be emphasized.
iTunes should be a service that works even when we're not using it on our computers. Even if not seen, it should be heard.
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