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TheMonday, at the world conference of Apple developers, Craig Federighi, head of software engineering of the company, announced the closing of iTunes. In one way, the only thing surprising was that Apple had taken so long to make that decision. It had been obvious for years that iTunes had become too heavy, a striking anomaly for a company proud of its sleek and functional design. The decision to split the software into three functional units (music, podcasts and TV applications) seemed logical and long-awaited. But for Internet users of a certain age (including this editorialist), this announcement has sparked reflections on personal and technological history.
There is music on the Internet for a long time. The advent of the compact disc in the early 1980s allowed recorded music to switch from analog to digital. But the music files on CDs were large – only one CD was around 700 MB – and for most people, the network was slow. So, transferring music from one place to another was not a practical proposition. But then, in 1993, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany came up with a way to reduce audio files by a factor of 10 or more, so that you could reduce a 3-minute music track to 3 MB without any noticeable loss in quality. . They called their new MP3 standard and, in July 1994, launched the first MP3 encoder, software that can record CD tracks and compress them with the MP3 filter.
It was a pivotal moment for the music industry, but it took five more years for that dime to disappear. At that time, music-loving music fans had "ripped" all their CDs with MP3 encoders and stored their music on hard disks. (I remember having to buy a bigger and extremely expensive hard drive to house my collection.)
And then in 1999, a teenage geek, Shawn Fanning, created a software system that allows users with MP3 tracks on their PC not only to find others with similar assets, but also to exchange those tracks with each other. . Fanning called his Napster file-sharing system, published it on the Internet and so changed the world. By the time Napster closed in 2001, the music industry had acquired more than 60 million users and virtually all recorded tracks were available – free – on the Internet, which had now become, as it was once said, " the heavenly jukebox in the sky ".
The problem was that most of these tracks were protected by copyright and that wholesale piracy was a good part of what was happening. But the win of the music industry on Napster was a Pyrrhic victory: the genie had escaped from the bottle. Dozens of file-sharing systems have appeared and the disk sector has found itself facing an existential threat.
That should have created an online system for law-abiding citizens to pay for music. But this seems to go beyond the capacity of an industry run by executives with a similar mentality and incentives to sell only physical objects called CDs.
Their inability has created the kind of void that capitalism hates. And a business man who saw in the incompetence of the music industry the commercial opportunity of a lifetime had developed. He called Steve Jobs.
iTunes was his vehicle to exploit this opportunity. Based on SoundJam MP, a program acquired by Jobs in 2000 and transformed into a relook of Apple, it was launched in early 2001. From the beginning, it was a revelation: a well-designed and functional software that facilitated the download , organizing and playing her digitized music – even if you were a complete beginner. And then, in April 2003, Apple added the iTunes Store, which facilitates the purchase and downloading of songs – legally.
Online piracy was not stopped overnight, but it opened the promise of a heavenly jukebox to anyone who thought it was better to pay for things. Which finally turned out to be a lot of people. In a way, you could say that iTunes has saved the record industry from its own incompetence. But this has also stifled Apple in a colossal market.
Music has played a disproportionate role in the evolution of the Internet. As Larry Lessig put in Free Culture: "File sharing music was the crack of Internet growth. The demand for Internet access has been more powerful than any other application. Jobs became the first authorized distributor of this drug and iTunes provided the saddle that allowed Apple to fly the tiger.
But over the years, the company has accumulated more and more functions in the software until it looks like something that Microsoft would have designed in the past. And we turned to the desire to play music directly on tapping, rather than in electronic containers, as predicted by David Bowie in 2002. That should have been redesigned years ago. But at least that money has finally dropped. iTunes is dead. long live music.
What I read
Paste it to cyberman
Robots come for your job? No, your employers are, according to a sharp test of Brian Merchant on Gizmodo, exploding the narrative that allows businesses to get out of business for automation.
Fight the fake
Facebook and Nancy Pelosi's fake video: Read an intelligent discussion of the issues addressed by Laura Hazard Owen at the online Harvard Nieman Journalism Lab.
Cybercoins
Ross Anderson and his colleagues at the Cambridge Computer Lab security group have published a landmark study on their Blue Touchpaper website that shows what has changed (and has not changed) the cost of cybercrime since 2012.
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