June 26, 2019 • 48 mins
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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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
(00:26):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:09):
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
(01:33):
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,
(01:58):
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
(02:21):
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.
(02:45):
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
(03:07):
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
(03:29):
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
(03:51):
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
(04:12):
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
(04:33):
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
(04:54):
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
(05:18):
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.
(05:39):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:20):
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
(06:43):
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,
(07:05):
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
(07:27):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:33):
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
(08:53):
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
(09:16):
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
(09:36):
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
(09:58):
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
(10:21):
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,
(10:42):
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
(11:04):
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
(11:24):
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
(11:46):
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,
(12:09):
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
(12:29):
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
(12:52):
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
(13:13):
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
(13:35):
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,
(13:57):
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
(14:20):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:07):
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
(15:27):
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
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:37):
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
(16:58):
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,
(17:19):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:02):
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,
(18:24):
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
(18:46):
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
(19:08):
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
(19:30):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:11):
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,
(20:32):
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,
(20:55):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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
(21:59):
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
(22:20):
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
(22:42):
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
(23:06):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:50):
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
(24:11):
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
(24:31):
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
(24:54):
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
(25:16):
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.
(25:39):
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,
(26:00):
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
(26:20):
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
(26:41):
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
(27:03):
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
(27:25):
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
(27:48):
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
(28:10):
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,
(28:33):
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
(28:54):
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.
(29:15):
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
(29:39):
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
(30:01):
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
(30:22):
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
(30:42):
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
(31:02):
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,
(31:25):
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
(31:47):
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,
(32:11):
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
(32:33):
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
(32:54):
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
(33:14):
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.
(33:36):
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
(33:57):
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
(34:20):
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.
(34:41):
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,
(35:03):
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,
(35:25):
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
(35:50):
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
(36:12):
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
(36:34):
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
(36:56):
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
(37:16):
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
(37:37):
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
(38:00):
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
(38:20):
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.
(38:43):
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.
(39:06):
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
(39:28):
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
(39:52):
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
(40:15):
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.
(40:37):
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
(41:00):
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
(41:23):
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
(41:47):
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
(42:12):
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
(42:36):
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
(42:59):
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
(43:21):
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
(43:44):
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
(44:04):
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
(44:25):
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
(44:49):
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
(45:11):
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
(45:31):
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
(45:53):
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
(46:15):
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
(46:38):
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
(47:00):
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,
(47:21):
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
(47:42):
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
(48:04):
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
(48:25):
heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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
(00:26):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:09):
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
(01:33):
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,
(01:58):
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
(02:21):
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.
(02:45):
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
(03:07):
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
(03:29):
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
(03:51):
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
(04:12):
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
(04:33):
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
(04:54):
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
(05:18):
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.
(05:39):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:20):
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
(06:43):
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,
(07:05):
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
(07:27):
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
(07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:33):
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
(08:53):
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
(09:16):
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
(09:36):
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
(09:58):
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
(10:21):
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,
(10:42):
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
(11:04):
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
(11:24):
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
(11:46):
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,
(12:09):
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
(12:29):
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
(12:52):
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
(13:13):
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
(13:35):
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,
(13:57):
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
(14:20):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:07):
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
(15:27):
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
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:37):
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
(16:58):
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,
(17:19):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:02):
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,
(18:24):
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
(18:46):
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
(19:08):
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
(19:30):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:11):
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,
(20:32):
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,
(20:55):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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
(21:59):
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
(22:20):
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
(22:42):
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
(23:06):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:50):
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
(24:11):
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
(24:31):
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
(24:54):
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
(25:16):
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.
(25:39):
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,
(26:00):
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
(26:20):
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
(26:41):
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
(27:03):
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
(27:25):
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
(27:48):
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
(28:10):
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,
(28:33):
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
(28:54):
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.
(29:15):
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
(29:39):
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
(30:01):
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
(30:22):
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
(30:42):
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
(31:02):
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,
(31:25):
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
(31:47):
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,
(32:11):
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
(32:33):
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
(32:54):
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
(33:14):
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.
(33:36):
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
(33:57):
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
(34:20):
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.
(34:41):
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,
(35:03):
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,
(35:25):
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
(35:50):
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
(36:12):
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
(36:34):
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
(36:56):
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
(37:16):
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
(37:37):
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
(38:00):
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
(38:20):
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.
(38:43):
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.
(39:06):
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
(39:28):
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
(39:52):
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
(40:15):
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.
(40:37):
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
(41:00):
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
(41:23):
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
(41:47):
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
(42:12):
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
(42:36):
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
(42:59):
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
(43:21):
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
(43:44):
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
(44:04):
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
(44:25):
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
(44:49):
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
(45:11):
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
(45:31):
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
(45:53):
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
(46:15):
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
(46:38):
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
(47:00):
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,
(47:21):
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
(47:42):
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
(48:04):
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
(48:25):
heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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