Apple is planning an announcement Tuesday morning regarding iTunes.
Count us among the cautiously optimistic. ITunes is one of the most successful software packages in history, installed on more than 125 million computers worldwide and used for about 70 percent of all digital-music purchases. (Exact numbers are hard to find, but it’s huge.) Its reach would seem to make iTunes a terrific platform for transforming the media landscape — if it weren’t such a bloated, hard-to-use, overloaded mess.
We don’t know what Apple will be announcing Tuesday morning (7 am Pacific/10 am Eastern). The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the situation,” says it will include the long-awaited arrival of the Beatles catalog to the iTunes Music Store. It could be the addition of a streaming-media subscription service to iTunes. It might be an overhaul of Apple’s abortive attempt at a social network, Ping. Or it could be something completely different.
Regardless of what Apple does announce, here’s what we’re hoping for.
Subscription Music
Already iTunes lets you rent TV shows. The company is building a billion-dollar, 500,000-square-foot data center, and has yet to do anything really interesting with LaLa, the streaming-music startup it acquired in late 2009 and shut down earlier this year. Isn’t it about time that Apple offered an all-you-can-eat subscription music service, similar to Rdio or Spotify or Rhapsody, that lets you listen to whatever you want?
It’s surprising the company hasn’t already done this (and a little bit embarrassing to us, given the number of times we’ve called for this). Still, if we were going to put our money on a bet about tomorrow’s announcement, it’d be this: The signs all point toward an imminent subscription streaming-music service. If it doesn’t happen this week, it’ll happen soon. We hope.
Make It a Cloud-Based Service
“Cloud” services are this year’s hot marketing trend, but for a good reason. Saying that a service lives “in the cloud” is shorthand for saying that it’s stored on a server somewhere out there on the internet, and don’t bother your pretty little head about where or how. It’s the internet equivalent of “and then a miracle occurred.”
But with an increasing amount of our lives lived through portable gadgets, cloud services meet a need: Letting us get to our stuff from wherever it is, wherever we are, no matter what device we’re using.
And that billion-dollar data center? Once you’re using it to deliver subscription music, why not let it deliver all of a customer’s music library?
In other words, to hell with syncing. We want our iTunes music streamed to us in real time — on our phones, tablets, notebooks, netbooks and work computers.
And there are millions of us who would pay for a service like that.
Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
Redesign the Awful User Interface
At some point in the distant past, iTunes may have had a clean, innovative, easy-to-use interface. But with the addition of a bazillion new features, the interface has become cluttered, hard to use, and frankly ugly. It’s got multiple columns, panes on the left and right, controls hidden way up in the left corner, secret features buried under menu items god knows where. Wired reader Aryeh Jacobsohn described it as looking like “a candy striper puked on a Cylon.” Seriously: Has Steve Jobs seen this?
We don’t have a magic wand, we can wave that would improve this mess. But you’d think that Apple, with some of the most-talented, best-paid designers on the planet, would have some ideas about how to make it better, cleaner and simpler to use.
Eliminate the Beach Balls
For some reason, iTunes just sucks computing power. That’s especially true if you’ve got a library of unusual sizes. Research by Webmonkey editor and music geek Michael Calore suggests that once your library gets bigger than roughly 300 GB in size, iTunes starts to chug and crunch. Granted, that’s larger than most people’s libraries, but it’s definitely relevant — especially as we’re buying and consuming media at an unprecedented rate, and doing so with larger, higher-quality files.
As Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel reports, iTunes is the only place he sees the spinning beach ball these days, “because my frikkin’ iMac has 12 GB RAM. ISN’T THAT ENOUGH, ITUNES?”