The new version of iTunes has loads of new features that keep it ahead of the pack of flavorless musical apps. Hooray. These new goodies include WMA conversion, party playlists, a new lossless codec, printing improvements and more. It is awesome to see Apple run in this space and put out feature improvements on short cycles. Happy birthday you plucky little 1 year old!
But amid the new features are several that reinforce the mainstream focus of the music industry in ways that seem out of wack with the creativitiy and energy of Apple's user base. I think a good case can be made that the sheer weight of mainstream marketing schlock is what is hurting the labels - and iTunes ought to grow the industry with a page from Amazon's playbook: universal selection and user contributed content.
There are now over 700,000 songs on iTunes Music Store (iTMS) - but too many of the big indy labels are missing. Case in point: when I tried to upload my iMix - a sort of "
Bummer. Here is a great chance to build out 30 second song samples and track listings by getting submissions from users. I'd gladly upload both when submitting my iMix. Here's a great chance to build bottoms up awareness of what users listen to - this would beat the pants off arbitron and the bestsellers list of old. But it runs smack into the mainstream ways of the iTMS. "What are you listening to?" Great question. Crappy experience. Don't ask the question if you don't want to know.
Click over to the new radio playlists and it gets worse. You'll find only mainstream radio and only mainstream tracks - none of the coolness of "real time playlists" like KEXP let alone the supreme coolness of "real time distributed bottoms up playlists" created by individual iTunes listeners. It is wack that while Apple does so much to empower content creators, they worship mamon in the music space.
I still love you Steve Jobs, and thanks for building iTunes, my square, lovable, mainstream musical friend. Happy Birthday!
Yeah, I agree that iMix is really cool at first glance, and not so cool at second. If it's a tool to help you find what people are really listening to, it'll tend to say "they're listening to the mainstream bands" more often than might be the case. But, I guess, as a tool for selling music, it'll probably work as well as List Mania worked.
Have you seen Audioscrobbler? I just found out about it yesterday and was quite impressed. It has usage charts both for the aggregate and for individual people. I think that this has a lot more potential to capture that bottom-up data that you're talking about. It's a simple plugin that can attach to iTunes and a bunch of other music players, and reports your listening habits in the background.
Only problem I see is that I can't find any good reason that it'll be able to survive heavy growth without a way to make some money. It already takes quite a while for tracks to show up on the site... there's a backlog of hundreds of thousands of songs in the queue at any given time. Apple should buy them.
Posted by: Erik Benson | April 28, 2004 at 03:46 PM
A couple links that got stripped out:
Audioscrobbler:
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/charts/
Their charts:
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/charts/
My page:
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/erikbenson/
Posted by: Erik Benson | April 28, 2004 at 03:49 PM