kenjisan

iTunes spells disaster

"Disaster" may be too strong a term here, but iTunes, the Apple Music Store, and the conversion of music from the album format to the digital one all point towards change for the music industry, and not necessarily change for the better.

Metamanda discusses her objections on her blog (metamanda>>weblog: itunes and crappy metadata), siting the simplification of the "artists" producing music as the main threat. The idea here is fairly straightforward when it comes to jazz or classical music. iTunes simplifies a song to "artist," "title," "album," and sometimes "composer." Even the category of "genre" yields some very sticky situations, but that's another entry entirely. She references an article off harlem.org (Jazz in 2500? iTunes versus Preservation), which laments that iTunes' metadata format puts too much emphasis on the headliner artist and often reduces an accompanying band to the notes, or less.

Meta goes on to relate this issue to classical music, where the composer is emphasized over the artist, yet he or she is relegated to the "composer" tag, which doesn't allow for easy comparison/browsing in iTunes.

The only other place to take this discussion is to "popular" music in general. I use pop music in the most generic of terms here and I have no wish to restart this discussion. I'm just going to post my reply to meta's post here:

This is actually a problem for "pop music" as well. In the era of the CD, when people actually went to a "store" and bought their music, not only did you get your compact disc, but you got a little booklet along with the compact disc. It had all kinds of great information, like who produced the songs, who wrote the songs, who was playing what instrument. If there was a guest guitarist or vocalist, they're mentioned. In iTunes, those people are reduced to either a tag in the title (so-and-so w/ so-and-so), they're stuck in the notes (this is rare), or they're left off all together.

I guess it stems from the simplification that is required of organization to such a broad degree. How else is ONE program going to deal with all types of music? It's the serious downside of technology. It's why I hate it when I have to design a "smart" form for people to fill out online. It's turning us into lemmings, I tell you! It's destroying our individuality!

Well, that's taking it a step too far, but you get the idea.