Apple Music Killed iTunes for Me

Your were my second digital music player, Winamp being my first. But you were better. You became my exclusive player in 2001, right after I got my first person computer: a titanium Powerbook, loaded with 10GB of storage space, Firewire 400, an airport wireless card, and a CD/DVD drive. I fed you my entire music collection. That took up most of my Powerbook’s space. Friends would argue that Winamp was superior because it allowed you to easily queue up the next song you wanted to play. But I didn’t need that. I was building amazing playlists, enjoying the awesome visuals you made, burning CDs, and once I got my first iPod, I was certain you were the superior player. You were elegant, simple, and straightforward. But I suppose those were simpler times.

As my friends migrated from Windows to Mac, from CD’s to iPods, flip phones to iPhones, you became the dominant player. More people liked you, but you also had more haters than ever. Suddenly, you were the default, and no one likes a monopoly. Your organization was your true selling point. You were a non-nonsense elegant skin, preventing massive mp3 libraries from collapsing into chaos. Love or hate, we needed you. You made simple iPod menus make sense. You were our helper. And you opened your own store, and killed those trips to Sam Goody—really, you killed those CD-swap sessions with our best friends. Those days we’d hang out in our friend’s bedroom, and shove as many of their (and their parents’/friends’/siblings’) CD’s into our laptop and copy generations worth of awesome music. It wasn’t all your doing. No one can forget Kazaa, iMesh, LimeWire, or the most infamous, Napster. Thank goodness the iPod played mp3s, even after you made AAC’s your platform’s codec of choice.

Maybe it was the iPhone that began your steady decline. With it, music apps made more sense than loading myriads of playlists onto my phone. My iPod could hold hundreds of gigs worth of music (and videos), but my iPhone was limited to 32GB.  It was a capacity issue. A choice between my phone’s performance and having my entire music library in one place that’s always with me. Tough one. Well, having an iPhone and an iPod seemed silly after a while. Suddenly, Pandora was back and better than ever. I could stream sweet stations at home. It was a sweet compromise. Keep my playlists streamlined, and stream the latest and greatest via Pandora. It did create a fair amount of work though. I had to be cutthroat with my playlists. Even the slightest bit of leeway, and suddenly I’m getting popups on my phone saying I’m at capacity. I suppose that’s what you get for having over 200GB of music on your laptop—speaking of which… 


When I switched my MacBook Pro’s 500GB hard drive to a 1TB  SSD, I thought that would be plenty. Then my photo collection went haywire, and suddenly, I was pushing all my music to an external hard drive, connecting that to my TimeCapsule router, and accessing my music wirelessly (with a slight lag). But it was crazy complicated and time consuming. When I found out about iTunes Match, it was a godsend. I needed it so bad, and despite almost everyone I know by that time being Mac-centric and/or iOS users, it was surprise that no one else was using it.

The reality: every was using Spotify except for me. I was still struggling to get my iTunes in check. iTunes Match allowed to put all my music into the cloud —PLUS, stream Pandora-like radio stations, commercial free, all for $25 a year. A YEAR! I thought that was a steal! Any song I owned could be accessed through my phone where ever. This was quite nice. But something went wrong. Things did not always work. Between constant iTunes updates, Podcasts taking up more and more space, and downloads getting stuck, it was just all to messy. Spotify was the easy way out. You pay a monthly fee, and your digital music life is simplified.  But I was already committed—it was the sunk cost  fallacy at its worst worst.

Things have only become more confusing since then. iTunes Match is no longer a thing. I can’t access the stations I had created because now I need to join Apple Music. My three month trial came and went, and I don’t even remember using it or understanding how it worked. It’s all too complicated, and I still haven’t given in to Spotify. But I’m back on Pandora. And I’ve found some great podcasts that introduce me to awesome new music. I’m over iTunes, and basically ignore my massive iTunes library. It’s not as organized as I remember, and just to see my playlists as a list requires jumping through hoops. As a user experience, it’s gone from the gold standard to an overly complex maze. It’s just not worth it anymore. Maybe I’m just too old to continuously figure and refigure these things out. I suppose this is just life post-physical formats. Now that the digital is the standard, to truly appreciate music you have to physically own it. Setting up a record player or cassette deck or CD stereo requires physical space, but it’s straightforward. Scrolling through an endless lists of pixels on a screen only to find out your stream is not available, or fails to load, or you simply can’t find the mp3 you know you have, is beyond infuriating—it’s karmic irony. Maybe I deserve it. I honestly didn’t pay for so much of my digital music library. It’s a collection of my tastes, combined with that of my friends' and family's. Maybe the greater my consumption, the more complex my needs became. To share is to complicate. It’s digital hoarding. I don’t need all the music I have, and now I don’t even listen to it the way I used to. I listen to Pandora, NPR, and podcasts because I have those figured out. Although I could go on about how much my iPhone’s Podcast app constantly fails to play the episodes I select, but that’s a whole other rant for another time.