Many waited for the bugs to work themselves out, blinked at the EULA, sighed, and carried on with the updates. Others found themselves blocked from listening to their MP3s on their iPhones until they docked the phone to their computer and renewed the license agreements-even if they hadn't purchased a single track through the iTunes Store. At least one saw his entire collection copied over with 6 million copies of Lorde tracks. Some users who checked the wrong boxes found their MP3s overwritten with replacement files encoded with digital rights management or with alternate versions of the same songs (Apple forgot to use iTunes Match, according to Connelly). But Apple's latest attempts to back up users' libraries to iCloud proved outright dangerous. These music fans (rechristened "power users" in the most recent lingo) are looking for alternatives to Apple's market-dominating media management software, and yearn for a time when listening to music didn't require being quite so connected.įor music collectors looking for an effective tool to play and manage audio files, Apple's mission creep has long been an irritation, and random burps like cross-branded mandatory downloads by a certain stadium rock band given to bouts of self-importance have been easy to LOL away. Users interested only in iTunes' media management features-people with terabytes of MP3s who want a solid app to catalog and organize their libraries-feel abandoned as Apple moves away from local file storage in favor of cloud-based services. Most of iTunes' latest enhancements exist solely to promote the recommendation-driven Apple Music, app downloads, and iCloud. But with its recent shift toward streaming media, Apple risks losing its most music-obsessed users: the collectors. By 2008, Apple was the biggest music vendor in the US. The iTunes store provided an easy way of finding and buying music, and iTunes provided an elegant way of managing it. At the start of the millennium, Apple famously set out to upend the music business by dragging it into the digital realm.
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