The End of iTunes

Published Jun 26, 2019, 10:00 AM

There's no doubt that iTunes changed the fortunes of Apple. So why did the company announce in 2019 that it was discontinuing the venerable program? We learn about how feature creep and a changing marketplace spelled the end of iTunes.

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Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I heart radio and I love all things tech. And first and foremost, my apologies if my voice starts to give out throughout this episode. Between when I recorded the first part of the iTunes Story, which came out before this episode, and this part the second part of the iTunes story, I got a terrible summer cold, and so I am on the mend. I was, I was just fighting it off when I recorded the first half, and now I'm getting it, you know, getting out the other side on the second half. So my apologies for the particularly grossness of my voice today. But the show she must keep going, I think, as the saying. And in our last episode, I covered the developments and launch of iTunes in two thousand one, when the program first launched, up to the point when Apple would introduce the iTunes Music store in two thousand three, and I also focused quite a bit on Apple's history leading up to that and why it would be such a big deal for iTunes to premiere. The company had managed to convince the music industry to take a chance on selling songs a la carte for cents a pop, and the record labels had little to lose and agreed with some conditions which I talked about. But in two thousand four, Apple expanded the iTunes Music Store internationally. It had started off as only being available in the United States, but next on the list of countries to join iTunes Music Store where France, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Austria, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands the Great White North. But by which of course I mean our buddy Canada had to wait a few months later. They got iTunes music store support starting December third, two thousand four, so just at the very tail end of the year. Now over the following year's Apple would continue to expand operations into new markets, which greatly contributed to the increase in revenue through the iTunes Music Store. Then we have iTunes version five, which debuted on September seven, two thousand five, And it was this version of iTunes that would set the stage for my career because it was iTunes five that adds support for a young form of media called podcasts. Now, technically podcasts were available on iTunes before version five came out. They had been added to the music store about three months earlier with an update called iTunes four point five. But it was really upon the release of iTunes five that people started to really hear about it and just to let you guys, peek behind the curtain a little bit, where your show appeared on iTunes if you were a podcaster, that was a huge deal back in those days. Arguably it still is, but I mean back then it was make or break. There weren't as many podcatching services back then, or at least not many high profile ones, so getting your show featured on the podcast page of the iTunes store could mean going from obscure to famous in very short order. To get featured, someone at Apple had to take notice of you, and it really helped if you happen to be really good, which is why my colleagues Josh and Chuck, hosts of Stuff you Should Know, got featured on iTunes pretty early on, just a few months after they had launched Stuff you Should Know, and that propelled them to the spotlight where they flourished. My show has appeared in the top ten technology podcasts frequently over the years, sometimes even reaching number one on occasion. I remember taking a screenshot the first time that happened because I was chuffed two bits, so to speak. The algorithms to determine placement in the top in We're never really entirely apparent, but it became clear that showing up on those pages really helped bring an audience to the show. Another feature introduced between versions four and five, but really emphasized in five, was Party Shuffle, which does not describe the type of dancing I do when I'm at a social gathering, although that would also be accurate. No. A party Shuffle would create a shuffled playlist, so instead of keeping the next song a mystery where you would have a song playing and you have no idea what's coming up next, the feature would actually take a list of songs and shuffle the order so that the user could actually still see the full list of songs, and that gave users the option of customizing a shuffled playlist and moving songs or even removing them completely from the queue. So you might have a nice list of songs and you think I don't even know what order to play these in so you could use party Shuffle. It would automatically randomize the order of that list, and then you can look over and make sure that still, you know, seems like a good party mix. It's pretty handy if you're building a playlist for a party and if you don't want six slow jams playing back to back. Eventually, this feature would evolve into something else called iTunes DJ, but that's uh slightly more complicated story that I might touch on a little later in this episode. Similarly, Apple had also introduced a service called air Tunes, which allowed users to stream audio from one WiFi connected device running iTunes. So really we're talking about a Mac computer because this is really before the iPhone and iPod touch eras, and then you could stream that to another WiFi connected device. Around that same time, Apple also introduced a piece of hardware called the Airport Express. It's a wireless access point that also had an audio output jack. So you could stream music from your Mac computer to your Airport Express outlet, and you could have speakers plugged into that outlet and you could play music in a different room. So that was the basic idea. You also had to have an ethernet cable plugged into that airport express. But it was a way that you could expand or extend the way you could play music through a space, So it was an interesting idea. Now. Later Apple would evolve air Tunes into a similar service called Airplay, which eventually could handle all sorts of media, not just audio streaming. I'll talk about that a bit later too. By the time iTunes five point oh came out, the Apple Music Store played host to more than two million songs, ten times the number that the store had opened with back in two thousand three oh and Steve Jobs had a new type of hardware to show off at that particular music event. It was what he called the iTunes phone, also known as the Rocker E one R O k R, was a phone made by Motorola that users could port songs from iTunes onto. But the Rocker would turn into a painful lesson for Jobs and for Apple. First of all, the phone was not very impressive to look at, and you can tell when Steve Jobs was showing it off at this event that he wasn't really feeling it. The phone looked a bit cheap. If I'm going to be honest, It was a candy bar style phone format from the old cell phone days, so it was a cell phone, it was not really a smartphone. It could only hold about a hundred songs, and you had to transfer music from a computer to the phone via a cable, so you actually had to put the phone and plug it into your computer and then manually poured over the songs the one hundred or a fewer songs you wanted onto the phone. And it was only available on singular wireless, which meant that users would have to get locked into a contract with a specific provider if they wanted to use this technology. Also, during the demonstration itself, the phone simply refused to operate as it was supposed to, and Jobs got visibly irritated on stage. This presentation is still available for you to watch on YouTube if you want to. It's the Music event from two thousand and five. He tried to show how the phone could pick up right after you left off listening and was failing miserably and made some comment akin too, well, if you can know what buttons to push, you can make it work. The iPod Nano, which Jobs also unveiled at that same event, fared much better. It was in line with Apple's aesthetic plus it you know, worked, Jobs suspected that phones were going to be a big threat to the iPod business before long. He was absolutely right. Phones already had cameras in them and some rudimentary web browsers, though these were mostly text based, and that was why he had agreed to work with another company to create the so called iTunes phone in the first place. It's the only reason he agreed to it. But he saw that when things were outside his control, he couldn't expect them to measure up to his standards. So you could argue that the lackluster demonstration of the Rocker in two thousand five is what pushed Jobs to create a department within Apple to develop the iPhone in the first place, although surely the development process was already far enough along at that point. Now. According to numerous sources and Apple itself, version five point oh had some bugs in it that caused issues for many users. The company issued a patch, but the full version of iTunes six wouldn't be far behind. It would release on October twelve, two thousand five, so essentially a little more than a month after version five came out. Version five in September, version six in October. So version five added some features and made a few changes to the user interface, but version six had a bit more to offer, and that's when video would come to iTunes. Starting with version six, users would be able to purchase music videos or episodes of certain television shows for the princely sum of a dollar ninety nine. And it was a good idea, boosted by the fact that MTV, which had built itself on top of showing music videos, had started to drift away from videos in favor of other programming. They had shown a decreasing amount of music video content year over year for several years running by this point, So now users would be able to watch music videos on demand, purchasing them for a pretty low price and keeping them forever. One thing did put a bit of a monkey wrench into the works, and that was YouTube. So in the early days of YouTube, this is back when YouTube was first launching, users were uploading all sorts of stuff to the service. You know, it was meant to be a place where people would put user generated content of whether it was home videos or sketches or whatever it might be. But in the early days of YouTube, it was mostly done by people who had no rights to the videos they were uploading. They were uploading stuff that didn't belong to them. It got YouTube and some pretty hot water from various studios out there, music studios, movie studios, TV studios, but that might have hurt music video sales on iTunes because you could find a lot of stuff on YouTube, though it wasn't guaranteed to stay up for long. The TV shows, however, we're doing pretty well. The videos also included short films by Pixar, which had made several feature length computer animated films for Disney at that point but had not yet officially joined with the Mouse House yet, and Steve Jobs, by the way, was a major shareholder in the company. Jobs had invested in Pixar essentially right after it spun off from Lucasfilm years earlier, so it was a great case of synergy there now. According to lifewire, though to be clear, I didn't see their source for where they got the statistic, Apple sold one million videos within the first twenty days of iTunes supporting video sales, which is not a bad start. But this is also a good time to note that people were starting to already notice some serious feature creep in iTunes, something that would become a real issue as the software would grow over the years. Eat your creep is when product developers keep adding features to something beyond its original intended purpose. In some cases, it might all work out, like with the famous Swiss Army knife. You know you've got a toothpick in there. Who thought that a knife would need a toothpick? But it works for Swiss Army knife. But in other cases you'll end up with a product that's a total nightmare. It might quote unquote do a hundred things, and maybe it doesn't do any of them very well. That's the bad kind of feature creep. It's part of what sidelined Copeland, which if you listen to my last episode you'll recognize as the code name for a version of the Mac operating system that never came to be. With videos being added to iTunes, some people begin to ask if, perhaps at the very least, Apple should reconsider the name iTunes. After all, on iTunes you could get music, but you could also get videos, e books and podcasts. It seemed like either Apple should change the name of the software to better reflect everything that was available in it or break the program up into more manageable applications, something will chat about at the end of this episode, because that's ultimately what they have done. The relatively simple interface of the earlier versions of iTunes was beginning to get a little less simple. For some reason, the company decided against either rebranding or restructuring iTunes, and not for the last time either. Not entirely certain what the logic was behind maintaining the iTunes name, because there were other instances where Apple didn't seem particularly reluctant to rebrand the service after they had changed it significantly, So I don't know what was special about this one. Still beyond a few critics who felt that iTunes was starting to get a bit too bloated and messy, things were going really well, and it laid the groundwork for the next, really big revision to the platform. The seventh generation of the iTunes program would come out in September two thousand six, following in the footsteps of iTunes five, which would come out the previous September. From here on out, Apple would establish the fall as the time for announcements about things like the iPhone, the iPod, and iTunes, although the iPhone would have to wait for a couple more years it had not yet been unveiled. Now you could download movies using iTunes. Earlier it had all been music videos and TV show episodes, but with iTunes seven you could do movies as well. But that also added to the feature creep. Criticisms people had for the program, but it became a popular option. Now. I've got a lot more to say about iTunes, but before I get into it, let's take a quick break. One thing that iTunes seven would add to the experience was a user interface upgrade in the form of cover Flow. And this wasn't actually an Apple invention. Much like iTunes itself, it was something that they had seen from a different developer and and acquired it. It was the work of an artist named Andrew Coulter in Right, who came up with the idea of representing files in a visual way in which you could flip back and forth through them like a slide show. And Apple would acquire cover Flow and then implemented it in iTunes seven point oh, so that users could browse through their music collection by album cover, sort of as if they were standing at a shelf thumbing through all their record albums. So you can kind of get the visual appeal, although as I understand it, very few um iTunes users typically talked a lot about using it because it could be a little bit of a hassle. UM. I don't know. That's anecdotal, Like I don't know if Apple ever gathered any information about it, I do know that it wouldn't hold on to cover flow forever. And later on Apple would be involved in a patent infringement lawsuit against Mirror World Technologies and later the parent company for the Mirror World Technologies, which was Network One, and it was all about cover Flow. At the heart of the matter was a patent that described a system that organized documents in a stream chronologically similar to the way that cover flow worked, but the patent dated all the way back to so it definitely predated the iTunes version of cover flow. While the court case went back and forth in favor of either one party or the other as it was making its way through the court system, getting appealed and pushed to higher and higher courts, the two parties would eventually agree to a settlement that gave Apple a full license to use the technology, and eventually Apple would phase out to cover flow, because again, while it was really flashy, it was not necessarily the most practical user interface. Other features that joined the iTunes family with seven point oh included gapless playback. This is pretty much what the name suggests. It's playback of multiple tracks with no gaps between the songs. Now, that isn't that big a deal between songs that have clear endings and beginnings, but on some albums, one track is supposed to flow directly into the beginning of the next track, and again at between the two breaks up the listening experience. If you want an example of this, you should check out the songs this beat goes on and switching to Glide by the Kings, which is one of my favorite transitions between songs. But obviously there are tons of examples out there in music, particularly on concept albums, where a song will flow directly into the next one, So gapless helped out a lot that way. iTunes seven would remain the standard version for two years, with iTunes eight premiering in two thousand eight. So this was unusual because typically Apple was updating iTunes at least annually, if not more than once a year. Because iTunes five and six both appeared just within a month of each other, but between two thousand six and two thousand and eight, when iTunes seven was the standard, Apple would have another big product announcement, which was, of course, the iPhone and Macworld two thousand seven, Steve Jobs got up on stage to introduce the iPhone, what he called a revolutionary product that changes everything, and that's exactly what the iPhone turned out to be. The sleek design, intuitive interface, and Apple's software blew away the admittedly biased crowd of Mac fans in the audience. It would be six months before the phone came to market, but Apple clearly already had a hit on its hands before even getting into the stores, and iTunes would play a big part with the iPhone, and the iPhone would play a large part of why iTunes is now going away in twenty At the event, Jobs explained that iPhone users would sink their phones with their computers through iTunes, just like they would with an iPod. He made the case that people were already used to this idea as the company was getting ready to sell it's one million iPod in two thousand seven. So from the start, iTunes and the iPhone were linked, both metaphorically and frequently physically. The original iPhone couldn't sync up with a user's account of the air. Users would have to place their phone in a docking station attached to their computer and the phone would sync up using iTunes, so you can make easy changes on your computer and then sink it to your phone, rather than having to go through your phone settings and change things that way. This added yet more features two iTunes technically inversion seven point three, that was the first version of iTunes to have iPhone support. Version seven point four would add support for another new Apple product, the iPod Touch, which, for those who might not be familiar, was sort of an iPhone without the phone part. The seventh generation of iTunes would go so far as to support the second generation of the iPhones operating system, which we now call iOS, with iTunes version seven point seven, so version seven lasted long enough to go through two different versions of the operating system for the iPhone. In two thousand and eight, Apple finally released a full new version of iTunes with iTunes eight, and in this update, the company included a feature called i Tunes Genius, which would generate a playlist based off a song the user selected. Genius would actually consult massive amounts of data in order to do this, And here's what was going on from a very high level. All right, Let's say you've got your music library there and you want to put together a playlist for a chill party of hipsters, but you don't really have the time to dive through your massive music library to curate the perfect playlist. Instead, you select one song to be the seed for this playlist, and let's say it's waiting for Superman by the Flaming Lips from your perspective. iTunes then pulls together a playlist of songs for you based on that selection, and it only takes an instant it's there almost immediately. But what's actually going on is a bit more complicated. Apple would take your data, including the information about all your songs in your library, the genre those songs would belong to, and how frequently you listen to each of those songs, and then would compare your data against the information of other iTunes genius users, and it would look for profiles that had a similar library to yours and the sort of things that they would tend to like. The Apple hasn't really revealed how it was weighing different variables, how it would assign weight to those variables, like how prevalent at particular genre is in any given library. How much does that matter? If my music library is eighty percent country music, then how much importance does the Genius algorithm give to the country genre? Uh? Or how does listening frequency affected? If I've listened to one particular song, let's say Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash, and I've listened to it five times as many times as the next closest song, then how much does that determine whether or not it shows up on a playlist? Those things were secrets, but it did use comparisons to draw conclusions about which songs would best match up to create a playlist of your choice. And it could also suggest songs in the iTunes music store that seemed to fit your preferences, but that weren't already in your library. So maybe it looks at your playlist and it says, oh, well, based on this, you should definitely have this other song, but you don't actually own this one yet. Here's a link if you would like to buy it, and you can listen to a preview and decide whether or not you want to add it to your library. In a way it's a little similar to what services like Pandora Radio we're already doing since two thousand five. Pandora Radio's method was to take songs and then break them down by describing them in as many different ways as possible. You take a piece of music and you say, all right, what are the different qualities of this music? So you might have ways of describing it saying there's a female vocalist, it has a complicated rhyme scheme, it's guitar driven, it's got a fast tempo, and so on. Then the radio algorithm would search for other songs in this database there were somewhat similar to the seed song you had selected, and then it would feed those extra songs to the user, And that gave opportunity for users to discover new music that fit their tastes. Maybe they'd hear a song that they've never heard before, but they'll love it because it happens to fall into the same sort of stuff that they already listened to. So Apple wasn't necessarily innovating in this space, but rather incorporating a working strategy into the existing iTunes framework, which is something the company is particularly strong at at identifying things that work well and then improving upon them. In addition to the Genius feature, iTunes eight also made available TV shows in HD format in the iTunes store, and the store continued to contribute a significant percentage of Apple's overall revenue, and it wasn't just affecting Apple. The company announced in April two eight that customers had purchased more than four billion songs from the ituned music store since its launch, making Apple the largest music retailer, beating out Walmart at least according to Apple's own press release. Other reports would state that Apple held a strong second place behind Walmart. So your mileage may vary on that particular point. It would eventually replace Walmart one way or the other. Question is just as when did that really happen and the pace was picking up. It was four billion songs when the company made this announcement in April of that year, but then in June, just a few months later, the company reported that the number of songs sold now topped more than five billion, which is incredible that it's it's an amazing achievement to have gone from four to five billion in just a couple of months. The closest competitor online with Apple in the music department at that time was Amazon, which had only been selling digital music downloads for about nine months. When Apple hit that five billion songs sold milestone, Amazon sales were about a tenth of Apples, But it is fair to point out that Apple had been in the business for five years at that point and Amazon had just gotten started. Business was going really well. In fact, it was enough to get discussions going in various state governments in the US about the prospect of taxing iTunes digital downloads. The concept faced a lot of opposition, particularly in California, not by not by coincidence that happens to be where Apple has its headquarters. But gradually many states would pass legislation allowing them to collect taxes on digital purchases. Not all of them would cover iTunes store purchases. It's a state by state sort of thing, but New Jersey would be the first to do so. Actually, the Garden State technically had done it in two thousand and seven, before any of this other stuff was happening. Version nine of iTunes would come out in September two thousand nine. Once again, Apple introduced new features with their increasingly gargantuan digital jukebox program. One of those was the iTunes LP feature. It's sort of like the bonus features on a DVD. For some albums, you could get lots of bonus stuff like music videos, live concert footage, liner notes, artists, interviews, and more. So it was kind of like getting a whole bunch of collectors editions stuff with your album purchase. For certain albums, not all of them had this. Similarly, Apple introduced iTunes Extras, which had bonus features for some films available on iTunes, so you could get deleted scenes and interviews and stuff like that when you downloaded your digital copy of let's say Batman Begins. That was one of the first movies to feature these extra things, and you would just you buy it from the iTunes store and along with the film, you would get access to this extra material. Another new feature was home sharing, which would allow iTunes users to share their libraries on up to five computers within a household. Each person in the household with an iTunes library could do the same with the others, so the shared library could grow much more quickly, and I'm sure it was a popular feature for folks who are living with housemates. Apple discontinued home sharing. Starting with iTunes version twelve point two, Apple also added in app management and sinking features and iTunes nine to let users arrange their app layouts, which then could transfer over to their iPhone upon sinking with the computer. One thing that Apple would take out of the music on the iTunes Store starting with iTunes nine was DRM, or Digital Rights Management. Apple had already negotiated with music label E m I to remove DRM from that labels music on the store a couple of years earlier, but everyone else still had DRM attached. In two thousand nine, the company was able to remove it from all the music in its store, and Steve Jobs had been an outspoken critic of DRM, but it took some time for Apple to actually ditch it. Amazon had already been selling digital music DRM free for some time. That to be fair, Amazon's foul format was MP three, while Apple was using A A C files that were at least marketed as being higher in quality. So you were balancing things out. Did you want higher quality music but with DRM, or did you want the lower quality arguably recordings but without DRM. Now as a concession of music labels, Apple also agreed to introducing variable pricing on music tracks, because before all songs cost nine cents. It didn't matter if the song was three minutes long or twelve minutes long, it was all ninety nine cents. But this agreement would allow labels to select a price of either sixty nine cents, ninety nine cents or a dollar twenty nine per song. And if you wanted to upgrade your library with DRM free music, you had to pay for it. In fact, it was thirty cents a song or sixty cents for an album, and I imagine that would get pretty expensive if you had a really big music library. Later, this would be replaced by a service called itune Match, which i'll talk about a little later in this podcast. First, I'm gonna go and drink a nice big cup of tea, and we'll be right back after this break. All right, we're in the home stretch. So iTunes had been criticized for a long time for the fact that it was getting too big and unwieldy to be useful, particularly for Windows users. Now I've used iTunes on both Windows and Mac machines, and anecdotally, which I realized is not really evidence, I can tell you that in my experience. Using it on a Mac, while not perfect, was way easier than using it on Windows, and anyone who has had iTunes installed knows how it can place a really big demand on computer resources. But things were about to get even more messy with iTunes ten, the last version to release during Steve jobs lifetime he would pass away in the flagship app from Apple got a bit of a makeover until version ten. The logo for iTunes was a c D with a pair of eighth notes on it. After all, back when the first version of iTunes came out, that's the narrative Apple relied upon. The idea was that users would rip music from their store bought c d s and create a digital jukebox on their Mac computers. But the CD was a bit of an outdated symbol by this point, and the updated logo was a simple pair of musical eighth notes on a circular blue background. There was no more c D in the background. But the feature that got a lot of attention, and most of it was not really positive, was the addition of a new social networking element in the iTunes program called Ping. The purpose of Ping was to make it easier for users to share with one another. You could share information about your favorite artists, your favorite albums, You could share your thoughts about live shows you had attended. You could also view concert listings in your area, and you could indicate which shows you hoped to go see. The idea was to extend iTunes out to be a more social experience of my users. That people like to talk about their music collections and find out what their friends are listening to and find out what they're artists that they love what they're listening to, And in fact, you could do that with ping. At least in theory, you could follow artists, and the artists were encouraged to post to the social platform and share information about their experiences and what sort of music they enjoyed. So in theory it was all a pretty decent idea. Apple would encourage discover ability, it would bring more value to the experience of using iTunes, and ultimately it would help sell more tracks to users because you would encounter new music, or you'd find out that your favorite artist happens to be a big fan of this obscure artist and you think, well, that's got to be interesting, and you go out and you buy out all of their stuff. There was one big problem. Nobody was using Ping, at least, not enough people to justify continuing the service. So why did Ping fail? One big reason might have to do with another social platform, everybody's favorite monopoly, Facebook. The rumor was that Apple had originally included Facebook interoperability in Paying. Users would be able to share their paying activity directly to their Facebook pages, and that made sense because everybody was already over at Facebook. That's where all your friends already were, so this would help attract people who weren't using paying, but who were on Facebook, and then they would see this service and the notifications and think, oh, I should check that out. But before Paying could even launch, something changed, and the story I've heard most frequently is that Facebook pulled support from the app, that this was a decision on Facebook's point, not on Apples, and that it was possibly in an effort to avoid helping give a boost up to a potential competitor, so you could argue it was an anti competitive move. Ping failed to gain any real traction and didn't survive to make it to iTunes eleven, which launched in two thousand twelve. So was it a terror experience? Well, I can't say from a personal perspective, as I actually never used it. I never really heard anyone bash it, But at the same time, I never heard anyone say anything positive about it either. It just sort of was and then it really wasn't. In addition to paying, iTunes ten would introduce Airplay. That's the updated version of the earlier feature called air tunes that I mentioned. With air Tunes, users could stream music from their iTunes PC to another WiFi connected device on their network. Airplay would work very much the same way, except it would eventually include video media. Apple also had more products that were compatible with Airplay at this point, so they were able to sell those as well. The third thing that iTunes tend introduced, though it would only be fully implemented in iTunes eleven, was iTunes Match. I also mentioned this earlier. So this service was to address the fact that we were shifting away from having a centralized personal comput uter as the hub for all our entertainment. You know, back when iTunes launched in two thousand one, that was how things worked. You would have your Mac computer, you probably have just the one Mac computer, and you would have it act as the home for all your digital media and in those early days that was pretty much just music or maybe audio books as well. If you wanted to burn a CD or load songs onto an MP three player, you would do it by using that machine. You would burn CDs, and that machines CD burner. You would connect your MP V player to that machine. Everything was centralized to that one gadget. But by two thousand eleven things were different. Now with cloud services and cloud storage, we could have all our stuff living on computers that are out on the internet somewhere. Sure, it wasn't sitting on our computer at home unless we chose to download everything. But the flip side was that if we were using any device to access our cloud account, we'd get access to all of that content. So if I got a brand new phone, I wouldn't have to sink it with my home computer and slowly poured over my entire music collection or go through and figure out which songs I wanted and which ones I didn't. I could just access my library of music in the cloud anyway. iTunes Match is a sort of a solution to a practical problem. See if you had purchased your music straight from the iTunes music store, Apple knew about it and those songs would automatically be in your cloud library because Apple had a record of you buying them. But what if you had ripped songs from a CD and then you had them in your library that way, or what if you had downloaded from some other source like band camp or something, And what if and I know this is scandalous, but what if you had pirated music? Well, iTunes Match would scan all the music in your iTunes library and it would look for matches in the Apple database. When it found matches, it would be the matched version that would join your cloud library. Not only that, the version of the matched songs in the cloud would be encoded to a high quality two six killabits per second a a C file, and they would be DRM free. So let's say you had bought a song in the early days of the iTunes music store. It would have been encoded at a killabits per second, so lower bit rate, and it would have also had DRM on it. Your cloud version would be higher quality and DRM free, so you could end up with songs that actually sounded better than the ones that were on your physical hard drive when you enabled iTunes match. For those songs that were in your library, but we're not in the Apple database. In other words, Apple did not have the rights to that music. They scan their database to say, well, you know, we don't offer this track. You got it some other way. It would then upload those songs, and only those songs from your computer to your cloud library. That would help guarantee that users would have access to their full library of music, but also cut down on data transfer requirements to make it happen. You don't have to upload everything, just the songs that Apple doesn't already have. The services subscription based, and it launched at about twenty five dollars per year. If your subscription were two lapse, you would lose access to those songs, though they would still be on whatever hard drive they were stored on, and Apple would allow users to download their cloud library to a Mac or PC, so you could create a backup first before allowing your subscription to LIMP to end, and you would end up with the higher quality versions of your songs, at least for the ones that Apple actually had copies of. Steve Jobs gave that presentation about iTunes Match, but not long after that he would pass away, and his passing was felt by the entire industry. Not just at Apple, and many people were wondering how the company would carry on without the iconic leader at the home. One thing that shook up the company in two thousand eleven, besides the death of their founder, was a report from the Telegraph that a security vulnerability in iTunes had given a British bunny the opportunity to create software that exploited that vulnerability. The company called Gamma International created what appeared to be a software update to iTunes, like a security update, but in fact it was essentially malware that would hack the person's iTunes account. The Telegraph reported that Apple had been aware of this vulnerability since two thousand and eight, but had failed to patch it until two thousand eleven, so that wasn't great news. In two thousand twelve, Apple introduced iTunes eleven. Boy did this stir up a hornet's nest. They paired that announcement with announcements about the iPhone five and the iOS version six that came out that same year. But this version of iTunes featured a brand new interface, overhauling the way iTunes had looked for ages. It also got rid of a navigation bar that had been part of iTunes for years, which frustrated a lot of users. People really didn't like the way this change may it more difficult for them to navigate through their collections and to go from things like music to TV two podcasts. The program now allowed for a sink listening or viewing experience, which meant that you could listen to an album or watch a show on one iTunes connected device, You could pause it, you could go to a different device connected to that same iTunes account, and you could pick up right where you left off. So if you were listening on your phone when you were walking home and you walk through the door, you switch it over so that your computer is using airplay to play it through your WiFi connected speakers. It picks up right where you left off when you're listening on your phone. Uh. This version of iTunes was also the official end to ping. Ping was done, and it only lasted a little less than two years. Really, UM and Apple kind of abandoned it, and it also had iCloud integration built into it. In two thousand and fourteen, the company would release the last major update to iTunes iTunes twelve, and this one got pretty harsh criticism as well. When it came out once again. Apple made big changes to the user interface. Uh, they did not go back to the old user interface. They changed it more. They removed the sidebar again. If you had put it in with iTunes eleven, it was gone again, making it pretty difficult to add back in. You could do it manually, but it usually it would require you to do a quick search on the internet to figure out the steps you needed to follow. The playback bar has changed as well. In general, a lot of users looked at the changes and said that the control and menu system was actually less intuitive and useful as a result. Not everyone hated the changes, but the people who did hate them really hated them, and they wrote long, detailed posts on the Internet about why the changes were possibly the worst thing ever. And I exaggerate a little bit with that, but I did come across one article that legit stated categorically that iTunes twelve was the worst soft Apple ever released and that it should be recalled. And I came across more than a couple that gave instructions on how users could roll back their version of iTunes to an earlier version. So that's never good to read if you're releasing software. Oh and this is also when Apple gifted every iTunes user with a copy of the YouTube album Song of Innocence, whether they wanted a copy of it or not. Lots of people complained that the album was taking a valuable storage space on their devices, particularly on iPhones, and also that it wasn't actually easy to get rid of the album. That eventually prompted Bono from You two to actually apologize publicly for the whole goof them up, and Apple would eventually let users delete the album more easily. An update to iTunes twelve integrated support with Apple Music, that is, Apple's music streaming subscription service. So here we get to the point where Apple is doing the thing that Steve Jobs said no one wanted to do more than a decade earlier, though obviously things that changed significantly within those intervening years. So for ten dollars a month, you could sign up and listen to music streaming on demand from Apple's entire database, and you could also listen to music that had been curated for you based upon your tastes as defined by your own personal music library in the cloud. And that is how it works today. So from two thousand fourteen to two thousand nineteen. iTunes twelve would continue to grow and add more support for features like Apple Music, but the behemoth was really out of control. It was impossible to deny that the software had grown too large, and that trying to keep the same aesthetic across multiple windows owned and operated by different teams with an Apple seemed like a fool's Errand in addition, the consumer trend of moving towards streaming services instead of purchasing copies of media meant the the iTunes store was starting to flag a bit. The sales were starting to drop off, so the writing was on the wall. Digital downloads are starting to follow the same trend as CDs and DVDs, so it made more sense for Apple to discontinue iTunes and focus on breaking up those services into three dedicated apps, which is what we're getting now. The successors to iTunes are the apps Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts, very similar to what is already on iOS devices. The company has assured customers that their music libraries will remain intact during this transition. All music purchased or transferred to iTunes will be in the Apple Music app, including playlists, so none of that is going away. Movies and TV shows will similarly be available on the Apple TV app. The podcast you subscribe to will be on surprise surprise, the Apple Podcast app, and Audio books will actually move over to the Apple Books apps, so everything is getting split up. To interface between a computer and iOS device like the iPhone or iPad will now require you to use the Mac Finder to do that, so you wouldn't use iTunes anymore. Mac Finder is now the the overlaying application you use to synchronize between a device and a computer. The next version of Mac os Catalina will have no support for iTunes, so this is Apple getting users prepared for a big change now. Personally, I think this is the right move, though it's got the potential to be really confusing for existing iTunes customers who use Mac computers. There are a lot of questions being asked, and to Apple's credit, the company is answering them over time, but I think it's hard to defend a piece of software the group so far beyond its original purpose. As for iTunes on Windows, there are no specific plans from the company as of the recording of this podcast to discontinue it I don't know if they'll continue to support it, but there are no plans on it going away. Also, the store element will still be there in the individual apps. You'll still be able to shop for stuff and download stuff if you want to. Although a lot more people are now just streaming things and not bothering to buy them at all. I know that's how I am. I haven't. I can't remember the last album I bought. It might have been the soundtrack to Hades Town. I did buy that one because it was so incredible, but beyond that, I mean that was like a one off, special thing. I usually end up streaming stuff because that's just convenient, and I'm almost always somewhere where there's an Internet connection. The only times when I regret going that route or when I'm on an airplane and I can't connect to WiFi and then I regret not having downloaded more stuff to my devices. But that's that's a rare case. Otherwise, I'm just streaming everything just like everybody else. So Apple was making a move that makes a lot of sense. You can't really fault the company for doing it. It is weird to see a an app that has been around for half my life now going away, but at the same time, I'm not feeling particularly sad about it. iTunes and I have always had a love hate relationship. I loved being able to synchronize between a device and a computer and get all that stuff on an m P three player. I hated just about everything else with iTunes. I loved getting my show featured on iTunes. That was always wonderful. It was very flattering, and it definitely helped bring listeners to the show. For that, I'm always thankful. But when I used it was using iTunes, I never felt like it was the easiest to navigate around, particularly from version to version where things would change so dramatically where you have to relearn where everything is in order to get stuff done. Um, it's interesting that the same company that can make such an intuitive user interface with the iOS devices also made a desktop application that got progressively more difficult to use, at least for me. Then again, I'm also old, so new things confuse me more and more every year. All right, Well, that wraps up this set of episodes about iTunes. I plan on doing an update about how stuff works in the next episode because I got a listener request for it. And uh, it's been a couple of years since I talked about how Stuff Works, and you guys might be curious to know what's been going on and how things have changed. You know, I say that I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works in my Heart Radio, But what does that actually mean. Well, I'll explain all that. I'll explain what the company is doing now in the next episode. Hopefully you'll you'll find that interesting because you know, these are people who are near and dear to my heart. Some of them are co workers and some of them are former co workers. But I'll explain more in that next episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes, you can send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com. You can drop on by our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our past shows. There. You also find links to the social media presence for the show, as well as a link to our online store, where every purchasing make goes to help our show and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Ye hext Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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