Jim Edwards
I was an early adopter of iTunes, and have been grateful for the way my iPod has made long plane journeys slightly less hellish.
But iTunes was developed in the 1990s, and was launched in 2000. It's old and increasingly clunky to use.
So I have given up on iTunes, and I'm never going back. I've switched to Google Music — and it's way better.
iTunes now is better than it used to be, back when it launched. But even so, iTunes today still looks and feels like a product that would have sprung naturally from Microsoft's Office/Windows environment. It arranges your songs in a sortable spreadsheet, and if any of them are mislabelled even slightly they can get out of order. Even Bono once told Steve Jobs that he thought iTunes looked like a spreadsheet.
If you have ever been forced by iTunes to go through your music collection, deleting or renaming hundreds of duplicate songs, you'll know how tedious the iTunes experience can become for someone who has more than a few hundred songs in their collection — which is to say, everyone. This is one of iTunes' lasting contributions to the history of music: It made pop bureaucratic.
The recent US antitrust trial, in which lawyers are arguing that Apple hurt consumers by forcing them to only listen to iTunes songs on their iPods (and not songs from competing companies that might have offered them cheaper), has reminded me of just how bad an experience using iTunes has been.
You might remember the first time you ever used iTunes. Wasn't it strange, the way you had to hook up your iPod to your computer, then open iTunes, and you could only change the songs on the iPod via iTunes? The setup is basically the same to this day, except that you can at last drag songs from other non-Apple sources into iTunes. It's still weird though. It goes against the Jony Ive/Steve Jobs mantra of good design: Products should just work.
iTunes doesn't just work. iTunes makes you do the work.
If you have a large music collection, with songs from Apple, Amazon, your own CD collection, and MP3s that were downloaded during the glory days of Napster when all music was free (not me personally, obviously!), then you'll be familiar with the ritual of carefully editing playlists and deleting songs that can't fit onto your iPhone or iPod, ahead of your commute or flight.
It sucks.
I reached the end of my patience with iTunes last week — after 14 years as a loyal customer — when I wanted to watch the 1998 sci-fi movie "Dark City." It's a flawed but beautiful B-movie with a stellar cast (William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly). I bought it on iTunes and then, out of curiosity, looked it up on Google Music, which is Google's cloud-based competitor to iTunes.