On Monday, Apple confirmed what had been reported as rumor just a few days earlier: iTunes is dead. This news is the tech equivalent of a middle-aged athlete finally deciding to call it quits after a series of injury-plagued seasons. By the end, nobody liked iTunes — it often crashed, it hid your old files, and the interface was bland and boring. Good riddance, right?
Well, the end of any era can make even a faded, dysfunctional piece of software the object of nostalgia. What else other than misplaced affection for the past explains the New York Times referring to iTunes as “a magical, one-click emporium where 99 cents could get you almost any song under the sun.”
A magical emporium? Are we still talking about iTunes here? Even back in the mid-’00s, when iTunes was shiny and new and subject to the kind of fawning media coverage that Steve Jobs was always able to conjure, iTunes was ultimately a cold corporate product whose obsolescence was baked in from the start. It was far from magical. In fact, it took a lot of the magic out of music listening.
I tend to identify as a Gen-Xer, though in reality I’m technically an Xennial — I was born in the late ’70s, so I experienced an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. I have affection, and cynicism, for both sides of the binary.
When it comes to shopping for music, I’ve lived through several distinct periods. I shopped in record stores — in my time we called them CD stores — back when you had to shop there. Then, I participated in the free-for-all that was the Napster/Limewire/Kazaa era. I eventually transitioned to iTunes and other à la carte pay-per-MP3 sites, and then I embraced streaming to the point where I currently have about a half-dozen listening apps on my phone.
Out of all those ways to access (and in most cases pay for) music, iTunes was the worst. By far. I mean, it’s not even close. Shopping in record stores is still the best experience — you have to go to a specific place, touch a lot of music with your hands, make a conscious decision to commit yourself to fully absorbing a limited selection of music, and then go home to play that music while doing nothing else. (I still do this, by the way, because it helps to ensure that music still has a ritualistic aspect for me. I guess I really am a Gen-Xer.)
The illegal downloads era was the opposite of that — it offered the thrill of total indulgence, where you could grab as many songs as your bandwidth and hard-drive space could handle. In its own way, though, it was pretty thrilling. The streaming era replicates that feeling with far less intensity. Now theoretical access to millions of songs is the norm, so it’s inherently less exciting. But at least it’s convenient.
In comparison, iTunes is a like a compilation of the worst aspects of all those other consumption methods. It made you pay per unit of music, as opposed to renting access to the celestial jukebox, like you do in record stores. It clogged your hardware with data, like illegal downloading. And it stripped away all of the stuff that used to exist in concert with music — album covers, packaging, basically everything tactile — just as streaming does.
I understand that those who came of age with iTunes as their first primary access point for music might feel wistful right now. But let’s not lie to ourselves about the software’s attributes. That New York Times article credits iTunes with creating “an entirely new business model for digital media” by convincing consumers to “own” songs rather than simply steal them. But anyone who thought they owned the music they purchased from iTunes never read the fine print of their user agreements.
Owning an MP3 purchased from Apple wasn’t like owning a compact disc or vinyl album. You couldn’t lend it to a friend for the weekend. You couldn’t resell it. You couldn’t even play those songs yourself on a non-Apple device — especially after Apple made it impossible to burn those files on to a CD. With iTunes, you basically had limited rights to “your” music collection.
The legacy of iTunes isn’t that it preserved ownership as a meaningful concept for casual music fans. What iTunes did was help to legitimize the belief that songs are now mere data that you don’t have to touch or put on your shelf or even technically possess. Apple’s goal all along was to convince their customers that music was something you put on your laptop or phone, the kind of tangible totems that inspire the devotion once preserved for records and CDs.
Apple achieved this, in part, by taking a lot of the fun and romance out of music shopping. When I think back to the early days of downloading MP3s, I can still conjure some warm memories of hunkering down on Kazaa for hours on end and pilfering mislabeled files from obscure albums I had only read about. And, of course, I have innumerable happy anecdotes about eureka moments I’ve had in record stores. I even have good stories about coming across some amazing song I never would’ve heard had I not randomly found it on a cool playlist.
But I can’t recall a single revelatory experience I had while buying a damn 99-cent song on iTunes. I once wrote that shopping for music on iTunes felt as exciting as filing your taxes online, and I stand by that. It was, at best, utilitarian — and then, in later years, it wasn’t even that.
Once iTunes convinced enough people that shopping for music wasn’t actually fun, it was only a matter of time before we arrived at a streaming-centric world. The redundancy of iTunes has been apparent for years — people who still like to buy albums get a lot more out of physical media, and those who like to stream have no reason to pay additional money for songs they can hear over and over for a small monthly fee.
So, I won’t be shedding any tears for iTunes. I will, however, be toasting my CD collection. I take special glee in the fact that as iTunes is shuttered, CDs continue to live on, like cockroaches and Keith Richards. Recently, a different New York Times writer called CDs “the greatest scam the music industry pulled off.” What if I told you that people once paid $9.99 for an MP3 album they didn’t even technically own? Would you feel any remorse that that scam was finally over?
