Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Is Apple's iTunes service nirvana for music fans -- or just the start of a file-format nightmare that will drive us all nuts?
Oct 28, 2003 | I downloaded my first MP3 file in February 1998. The process was convoluted to the point of absurdity. I used one program to rip a song from a CD I owned, another program to convert that into a compressed MP3 file, and a third program to upload it to an FTP site that required visitors to donate their own MP3s first before any downloading would be permitted. To complicate matters further, just finding that FTP site required lurking in seedy chat rooms where file traders exchanged passwords to sites that might be open only for a few hours in the dead of night.
And yet, there was something so obvious and right about playing music on my computer, on simply desiring a particular track and then going and getting it, that I knew that something fundamental had changed about my relationship to recorded music. When my Rage Against the Machine track blasted out of my computer speakers, I was transfixed by a vision of music-consuming utopia: Some day, everything ever recorded would be one or two clicks away. Every bootleg, every B side, every studio outtake. This is what the Internet was good at: connecting me with the objects of my desire. I want; therefore I get to have.
Questions of cost were not meaningful to me. I am no fan of record companies or overpriced CDs, but I am also not one who believes that all intellectual property should be free. I was, and am, plenty willing to pay a fee for a desired service. Indeed, when Napster ushered in the era of instant music gratification in 1999, I always felt a little uneasy with the justifications that file traders made for the morality of their copyright violations. To me, the success of Napster and then Kazaa demonstrated that there was a gaping market opportunity, and the longer the record companies took to get their act together, the longer they would stoke the flames of piracy.
So while waiting for an online music service that was right for me, I contented myself with ripping my own CDs to my hard drive and burning compilation mixes for my own amusement and as gifts for friends. And then came iTunes.
Like millions of other Windows users, I was excited when iTunes was finally made available to the non-Macintosh world two weeks ago. At the original debut of iTunes' online music store, it seemed clear that this was best legally sanctified option so far -- and not just because I lusted after an iPod. Steve Jobs and Apple ("Rip. Mix. Burn.") understood that instead of resisting music consumers, it was time to aid and abet them. I downloaded the software within hours of its being made available and bought my first songs within minutes of installation.
The quality of my life has improved. But iTunes for Windows is not perfect, and my music consumer utopia is still an unrealized dream. Despite its vaunted half a million songs, I want plenty of albums and acts that are not yet available. I am greedy. I want everything. Let me buy it now. I'm also not crazy about the iTunes library organizing software. But what alarms me the most is the flip side of Apple's success -- a looming battle over file formats that, at least in the short term, is going to force consumers to make hard choices.
Because iTunes won't play my Windows Media music files. And the Windows Media Player won't play songs purchased from the iTunes store.
That's not the future I want to pay for. In the 21st century era of late capitalism, the consumer is supposed to be king -- my every desire is supposed to be reflected by marketplace offerings. Instead, the market is ordering me to get Steve Jobs' smirking grin tattooed on my butt, and while that may be an improvement on being branded with a Microsoft iron, I'd still rather keep my skin as it started, unblemished.
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