Image via Complex Original
Fourteen years ago this week, Steve Jobs stood on the MacWorld stage and introduced the world to iTunes, the service that would revolutionize the music industry and help make the iPod one of the most popular devices ever.
When it launched, iTunes was a sleek new piece of software. It was pretty bare-bones when it first launched, but it would later change the way we consume music and fuel our transition from compact disks to digital files. It looked stylish, organized music beautifully, and was a breeze to use, all of which factored into its popularity. It'd been built with a minimalist design in mind. Menus and options were easy to understand and access. But as the software—along with Apple's hardware—evolved, more things had to come in the small package.
Now, with competition from streaming music companies like Spotify and Pandora, iTunes has lost some of its coolness. Considering that iTunes digital music sales have fallen between 13%-14% worldwide in the last year, a lot of people are feeling the same way.
In honor of the aging program that's still alive and kicking, here are 14 of the biggest changes Apple's made to iTunes throughout the years.
iTunes Syncs With iPods
When: October 2001
The first big update to iTunes added MP3 CD burning, an equalizer, and cross fading to Apple's music player. But its most important feature was being able to sync with an iPod—the cool new MP3 player that Apple had just released. By simply plugging it in, iTunes could sync songs and playlists with the device, and you could carry around "1,000 songs in your pocket," as Steve Jobs famously said during the unveiling of the iPod.
In the next decade, computers moved from being our primary way of surfing the Internet to acting as a storage center for the data on our music players, phones, and tablets.
Smart Playlists
When: July 2002
The Smart Playlists feature made its debut with iTunes 3, and let users create playlists that followed a set of rules. These rules could organize songs into "Recently Played" or "Top 25 Most Played" playlists; users could also go as far as organizing them by the dates the songs were added, or songs from a certain year—all by clicking a few menu options. Pretty basic by today's standards, yes, but this gave people with large digital music libraries a new way to consume their music. CD players were becoming more obsolete by the minute.
The iTunes Music Store
When: April 2003
The iTunes Music Store was the most important change to iTunes in its then-brief history. First appearing in the iTunes 4 update, the store introduced a way for users to buy digital copies of their favorite music all in one place. People had been pirating content for a long time (the original Napster has only been shut down a couple of years earlier), but this was a simple and legal way to purchase songs. For $.99 a pop, it wasn't half-bad; it was a hell of a lot better than being picked out of obscurity and sued for millions by record companies.
A chart (seen above, to the right) let users see what the top selling songs were, and customers no longer had to purchase entire albums to listen to a single track.
Party Shuffle
When: September 2005
Apple introduced Party Shuffle with iTunes 4.5, which let users randomly shuffle their music in a "play queue." A simple enough tool, but it was popular because it shuffled songs a bit differently. Instead of randomly picking a song right when another ends, users could see the song that was up next and could even edit the queue as they pleased by un-checking tracks they didn't want to play. Or, if they didn't like the randomized song order, they could hit it once more to see what iTunes would come up with.
Later on, Apple would rename Party Shuffle to "iTunes DJ," which let friends request songs through mobile devices—but the company later scraped that in iTunes 11 for the "Up Next" feature.
Music Videos for $1.99
When: October 2005
Music videos and episodes of TV shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives were available to download in the iTunes Store with the iTunes 5 update. They sold for $1.99, a dollar more than songs. With this move, Apple one-upped MTV by providing videos on-demand instead of, you know, waiting around for TRL. Yet, around the same time, YouTube launched, and would become the go-to spot for music videos in the following decade.
Cover Flow
When: September 2006
With the rise of digital media and CD sells plummeting, album cover art was largely getting passed over. In order to give cover art some more attention, Apple introduced Cover Flow with iTunes 7. When scrolling through selections, the cover art for the corresponding track would be displayed in a window above the songs.
Yet this feature, too, got the ax in the iTunes 11 redesign.
Home Sharing
When: September 2009
In iTunes 9, Apple let users share their music and video libraries—that goes for podcasts, playlists, and audiobooks, too—on up to five other computers in their home. iTunes had already allowed people within the same network (like classmates and co-workers) to share music with each other, but didn't let them store the songs on their own playlists. If a computer in your network was turned off, but it had the song you wanted, you were out of luck.
Home Sharing made sharing music as easy as dragging and dropping the tracks between libraries—so if you wanted to listen your dad's Led Zeppelin collection, he wouldn't have to be on the computer for you to do so. This was one of iTunes best improvements, and opened the door to the family sharing features (with things like app purchases) that were introduced in iOS 8.
Apple Updates iTunes Privacy Policy to Collect Location-Based Data on Users
When: June 2010
Just a few years before data collection would come under scrutiny thanks to the Snowden leaks, Apple made tweaks to its iTunes Store privacy policy that allowed it to collect real-time data on the location of its users ages 13 and over. The policy gave Apple permission to share GPS data with third-party companies who provide advertising and promotional services, and "public and governmental authorities within or outside your country of residence."
U.S. Representatives Edward J. Markey and Joe Barton, the co-chairs of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, sent letters to Steve Jobs and investigated Apple. They were ultimately satisfied with Apple's written explanations for the policy changes. Now we know this is the exact kind of data that the NSA was targeting.
Ping Social Network
When: September 2010
Even if you've used iTunes for the past decade, I wouldn't blame you if you haven't heard of Apple's failed social network, Ping. Ping, entirely based in iTunes, was the company's attempt to get users to interact with each other about the music they were listening to. But in order for a social network to survive, people have to be on it—and since the company limited their audience by keeping Ping limited to iTunes users, it failed to grow in popularity. Apple killed it off September 2012.
iTunes' Security Flaw Took Apple Three Years to Fix
When: 2008-2011
The Telegraph reported in November 2011 that a security researcher had informed Apple of a vulnerability within iTunes that a British company was exploiting. The company, Gamma International, marketed software to governments to hack iTunes via a bogus security update. Records were later found in abandoned offices that showed the software had even been offered to Egypt's secret police. According to The Telegraph, Apple was aware of the hacking software in 2008, but the company didn't patch it until 2011.
iTunes 11
When: November 2012
iTunes 11 is one of the biggest updates to iTunes since the introduction of the Music Store—and it brought the biggest headaches. Apple redesigned the interface from the ground up, eliminating Ping, iTunes DJ (Party Shuffle), and Cover Flow, and moved around a bunch of sorting options. They also removed the navigation field that had traditionally been on the left side of the screen. Annoying.
At this point, one of iTunes' biggest problems finally became a little clearer: The program was growing too large for itself. Instead of being as music-focused as it once was, it'd evolved into the center for books, TV shows, movies, and your iOS devices. Complaints about long boot-up times and even longer installation times became the norm. Too many plates had been stacked on top of each other, and were beginning to tip over.
iTunes Radio
When: September 2013
With ad-based streaming music services taking a bite out of song revenue in iTunes, Apple launched its own service, iTunes Radio, with iOS 7. It's available to all iTunes users and puts Apple in direct competition to Pandora and Spotify, the current leaders in streaming services. Apple bought out Beats Electronics the following year, gradually acquiring their headphones technology and Beats' own streaming station, Beats Music. Reports toward the end of 2014 said that Apple may look to merge iTunes Radio with Beats Music in the near future.
U2 In Every iTunes
When: September 2014
On the day they unveiled the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple also announced that they every iTunes user would receive U2's new album, Song of Innocence, for free. Which sounds cool, except that they automatically downloaded the album onto nearly 500 million iTunes accounts. Users complained the album took up too much space on iPhones and that it couldn't easily be removed. U2 frontman Bono apologized for the promotion and Apple allowed users to delete it.
Apple Starts 14-Day Return Policy on Songs in Europe
When: December 2014
Apple complied with the European Union's right of withdrawal rules in December, letting EU customers return digital content, like songs, within 14 days of purchasing it, without "any reason":
Right of cancellation: If you choose to cancel your order, you may do so within 14 days from when you received your receipt without giving any reason, except iTunes Gifts which cannot be refunded once you have redeemed the code.
This is a great policy that, unfortunately, isn't in place on the other side of the Atlantic. In countries like the United States, Apple can still refuse to refund a customer's purchase, and they may only give money back if there's a technical issue during a download. Google, on the other hand, lets users return a digital product within two hours of purchase. (If you're anything like me and have regretted picking up that game that looked great in the preview but only kept your attention for 10 minutes, this would definitely be a welcomed option.)
Cross your fingers for the iTunes of 2015.
