Apple's groundbreaking digital music outlet iTunes is a year old, and truth be told, I've had it on my Thinkpad since the first day it was available to PC users. To date, I've spent a total of $173 on music purchases from iTunes, or about one every other day. My library has 1,783 songs in it. And yesterday, I set up my daughter Veronica - who turns 12 tomorrow - with an iTunes monthly allowance. So I'm a moderately heavy iTunes user; it's become part of my daily life.
To me, iTunes is well on its way to becoming one of the those huge permanent corners of cyberspace where a massive amount of activity takes place - a community of users and consumers where the right combination of information, commerce, and human interactivity provides for growth and ubiquity. Think eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google. I know Apple and Steve Jobs conceived of iTunes as a loss leader to move iPods, but I suspect that long-term, the market for iPods - the high-end of portable music players - will flatten out long before the market for a platform to manage digital entertainment. Don't get me wrong - I love my iPod, but if I'm an Apple shareholder, I want my money in the bigger opportunity. Call me crazy, but 70 million paid downloads is a figure that leaps off the first year's balance sheet, to me.
This week, Apple released an update version of iTunes and it's got some nifty additions. So if you take iTunes itself as a bigger opportunity than it's been given credit for - that it's the baby, not the bath - here are some tweaks big and small, that I'd like to see.
- More community
The updated iTunes allows users to create playlists and mixes that can be shared with the great community. It's a nice addition (here's a proto-punk playlist I created), but still a rather shallow application of one of the key principles of Internet commerce: that involved consumers buy more product. When I'm on the network at the office, my co-workers and I can share our music libaries. But there aren't many ways to share ideas, new music, reviews, rumors, concert reviews and playlists. I'd spend more time, if there were.
- More media
Right now, iTunes offers about half a million songs for download. But why limit the interface to songs? There are some spoken word files - but i'm a radio junkie. Why not allow users to sign up for subscriptions to radio shows, for later listening? Or for TV talk shows? Or conferences and speeches? You see what I'm getting at - this is an audio interface I use every day. It has a chance for ubiqity.
- More formats
Because it's aimed at moving more iPods with the gadget's proprietary format and inferface, iTunes imposes limits on the kinds of files that can move from desktop to device. Only Apple-encoded files - and only to iPods. Again, this limits the adoption of the interface, or rather, the operating system for media.
- More information
Great as it is, iTunes is woefully skimpy on information and research on the music it's trying to get you to buy. Album reviews, musician information, session dates, relevant discography - very, very slim. This is no place to learn about music. And if you're a classical music fan, forget about it - some songs are grouped by composer, others by lead performer, others by orchestra etc. Information is skimpy, browsability is nil. Go straight to Amazon.
Will iTunes be the operating system for audio media in the next few years? Or will it be a quickly outmoded footnote to another slick but commercially limited Steve Jobs gadget? I'm hoping for more functionality - and more communications. And Apple should be looking to dominate.
