On the morning of September 9, 2014, unsuspecting iTunes users — 500 million of them — woke up to a quite smelly surprise. They’d been ‘gifted’ the new U2 album, Songs Of Innocence, against their will. And you couldn’t delete it; Apple had to provide proper instructions on how to. As you’d expect, the stunt was not well received, and within a month, the U2 frontman, Bono himself, had to offer an apology. It was an enjoyable disaster, but one that’s unlikely to be reprised anytime soon.
Because iTunes is now dead. Apple has done it again. As they announced this past week, they plan to discontinue their somewhat iconic software in favour of having separate apps for different kinds of entertainment.
The role iTunes performed — to varying degrees of success for close to two decades — will be shared by three apps: Apple Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV.
‘Disruption’ in the tech world has become a convenient buzzword for radical progress. But, crucially, music is an activity that begs for habit-forming. Familiarity with the setting, the gear used, the software or streaming service employed, as well as the songs themselves, all add to the experience in intangible ways. So while iTunes had its detractors because of its clunky interface, it remained a tool a lot of people had gotten used to, as they’d arranged all their music into one consolidated library.
Restless tech
While this latest decision isn’t quite as bizarre (or evil) as Apple getting rid of the headphone jack from their iPhones, it still speaks of a kind of restlessness in technology that’s gravely at odds with the process of listening to music.
In 1999, the ugly world of music was obliterated by Napster, which enabled P2P sharing of music on a large scale and brought the industry to its knees. The shift from music via CDs to direct download MP3s had kicked off in earnest. Apple provided a blueprint to capitalise on this in 2001, first launching iTunes, which became a marketplace for selling music digitally. And then with the landmark iPod, which led to a mass shift in listener behaviour once more.
That’s what invariably happens with music. When I was growing up in the 90s, the primary means of consuming music was through television — remember Chitrahaar? Movies had songs, and there was also that ratty old device called a transistor radio. Soon, we moved on to playing tapes off 2-in-1s (or “decks”) and the really quite radical Walkman. Basically, ever since I can remember, the way I listen to music has been defined not by my preference in format, but by whatever technology is shoved at me, depending of course on affordability.
From tapes, we moved to CDs. A few years of getting into that, and boom, Napster blew up the algorithm. Illegality aside, the software gave power to the listener; we got to decide what, when, where, and how. The iPod followed a couple of years later. And so we plodded along for a decade or so, getting used to this mix of CDs and digital music.
Over the past few years, there’s been yet another shift. Notice how people send links to music through WhatsApp a lot more? Everyone now uses a mobile phone as their primary device. It’s the coming together of a lot of factors: accessibility and affordability of smartphones, fast and cheap mobile internet in a post-Jio world, and the rise of streaming services.
iTunes’s descent, first into obscurity and now extinction, is perhaps indicative of this shift, as people prefer phones now.
In the past three decades alone, we’ve bounced from format to format, getting used to one, then being treated to a whole new one altogether. It’s almost like an arms race, and one that seems to be at loggerheads with the very thing it’s trying to improve: Do we really need a sleeker interface? Why are wired headphones on their way to becoming redundant?
I doubt I’ll miss it — habit-forming takes but a few weeks — but the end of iTunes does also seem like the end of yet another era.
The writer is an author and freelance culture writer from New Delhi who wishes he’d studied engineering instead.