I don’t know about you, but I was expecting something a little bit more from today’s iTunes announcement. Streaming music? Enhanced song previews? A completely rewritten iTunes application? Anything? No. We end up with The Beatles. What kind of crap is that?
Okay, so I don’t want to offend all of The Beatles fans out there, but I guess I have to in order to make my point. The Beatles is a music group. They made music. They have withheld their music from iTunes since forever, and they became an enemy of the tech savvy among us for acting so incredibly greedy. Of course, if I was one of the world’s greatest musical sensations, I’d want to be filthy rich too, but that is beyond the point.
The point is that this wasn’t even worth all of the hype. In fact, this was more or less Steve Jobs gloating that he finally managed to convince the rights owners that The Beatles should be on iTunes, thereby reassuring the world that if you want to deal in the music industry, you are going to have to go through Apple if you want to get anywhere.
Fine. That’s all good and stuff, but where are the improvements?
I (along with quite a few others) have been bitching about the horribleness that is iTunes for years, and Apple has yet to do anything to fix this piece of garbage. Sure, it’s the best thing we got for managing music on the Mac platform, but it could be so much better. In fact, it could be great. But it isn’t.
So, congratulations to The Beatles rights holders for finally coming to your senses. Congratulations to Apple for finally solidifying their position in the music industry. Congratulations to Steve Jobs for being able to gloat about how awesome Apple really is. But can you fix the damn iTunes application?
I know I’ve been a little bit naughty, but all I want for Christmas is a brand spanking new iTunes (along with a Macbook Air, iPad, and iPhone 4 on Verizon). Pretty please?
James, I feel the same you feel. Why the whole big deal for something like this?
I was really expecting for something more, but that’s what they gave me…
Jobs, your job is to amaze me. Try harder!
you realize that it had nothing to do with “the group” deciding to be on iTunes right? After all only 2 of them are alive still and the one that was butting heads with Apple and who has the rights to the songs is Yoko Ono.
I think if they create a whole new app, they should call it iMedia or something like that…
or iStore, with the meaning “My Store”
First things first Peter iStore has already been rumoured within mac OSX Lion for macs which includes a app store for macs and it will be called iStore
But also i was well dissapointed with Jobs as i was expecting them to have finally decided to start competing against Spotify which is very hot in England not sure about USA but it is over here and i thought they had developed some form of internet cloud style thing, where you could listen to anything but have to purchase the songs to put them on to your iPhone or iPod touch or maybe even getting an app so you could access it anywhere on the internet but i was given the damned Beatles. I ain’t gonna lie i love the Beatles one them lives in my village but i think that it was a bit over exaggerated
I agree with you that iTunes is a piece of crap that needs to be fixed, but you gotta get the facts down about the iTunes/Beatles story. A Google search reveals lots of McCartney quotes from the past year like this one:
“To tell you the truth I don’t actually understand how it’s got so crazy,” Sir Paul told Newsbeat. “I know iTunes would like to do it, so one day it’s going to happen.”
“It’s been business hassles”, he said. “Not with us, or iTunes. It’s the people in the middle, the record label [EMI]. There have been all sorts of reasons why they don’t want to do it.”
I agree with you on your iTunes stance. On my iMac, iTunes works extremely fine without any problems. But on my Windows XP, it takes sometimes up to five minutes to open. Apple probably only tested iTunes on their Mac computers, not on any PC’s.
Is this “breaking news” or an editorial? How was this even allowed to be published without a fact check?
Is this an urban myth?
I understood that Apple Records would only allow Apple Computers to continue calling themselves Apple so long as they didn’t do anything musical.
When the Mac cam out with audio alerts, one musical one was called “sosumi” (so – sue me).
I always thought that was the issue
Yep – never had problems with iTunes on my Mac – could be better – but I have learned how to use it.
A bit off topic here… but have to say… I am sorry for you guys in the US. You’re missing a lot. And I am talking about Spotify (www.spotify.com). It has for me and for many others changed the way we listen music. It has everything, streaming music & playing local files, having offline playlists (of music from Spotify “library”), mobile device support & sync (iPhone, Android, Nokia…), social media integration (Facebook & Twitter) and really easy ways of finding new music.
Okay, that sounded a bit like and ad…
…maybe it is a bit of an ad. But reason why I brought it up, is that you guys could have it in the states as well. But as far as I know it is mainly because of your music industry etc who is giving hard time for spotify to make deals with record labels etc to be actually able to start offering their service.
And I am scared – really – that in the long run your music industry will keep stopping spotify to work and allowing some US service (say Apple for instance) to copy the awesome idea of spotify and so killing spotify in the long run everywhere else as well. I am Finnish person and I am really happy to have that service in my country, but scared that this relatively small company originated from our “dear neighbour” Sweden would die of because of music industry in United States.
To be honest, I was reliefed the “big announcement” wasn’t about streaming music or anything, that it was only just about the Beatles. Which I think are bit overrated still.
i am not sure who are these people saying itunes works just fine on their computers (“i learned it” – lol. pompous idiot). they just probably sync. delete few songs, sync. smile that quiet knowing smile, after all they smart, they knows things, oh, they probably even were to school!
try doing this with 150g of songs, retard. try moving to another computer with your songs left only on your ipod and have fun taking them off, or just saying screw it, to re-rip all the cd’s just cuz u didn’t buy the stupid songs from itunes store. you happen to own them all.
screw jobs and his glorified mafia. i mean i like mac and so forth, but when i had pc, i had problems and i knew how to fix them. here i am at a loss all the time. less problems, take about the same total net time to figure out, so cause more frustration eventually.