To understand the reason people hate iTunes, you have to understand what iTunes function is.
Apple is capable of making some truly elegant and easy to use software. Many examples of this exist and even someone who is not an Apple Fanboy, such as myself, can recognize the ability of Apple to produce software with excellent user interface qualities.
Steve Jobs got the initial agreement from the music catalog companies to sell digital copies of their product (music) by producing a system that was airtight enough to persuade said companies that high quality digital copies of their songs would not be instantly and widely available. Also, he set a price point per song that seemed well within the discretionary impulse purchase price of almost everyone, $.99/song. Even after subtracting out the exhorbidant percentage Apple scoops off the top, this would equal the profitability of the music industry.
DRM was the key to this success. But DRM is not entirely understood by the public. DRM protected media is encrypted to protect the content from illegal distribution. But (and this is a huge but), whenever a company sues for illegal copying, they sue over breaking the encryption, not over the content. This allows the music catalog companies (via the RIAA) to sue people for infringement and never ever pay a single penny to the artist. After all, the lawyer isn't suing because a person illegally had a digital copy of a song, but because someone at some point illegally extracted the song from the encryption.
So, in reality, the purpose of iTunes software is to protect the arrangement between Apple and the various music catalog owners. It is designed to make it harder to access your purchased product and exercise what the Supreme Court has designated as 'fair use' because fair use does not allow you to break DRM encryption. For that reason, iTunes can't really implement many features that would allow you to copy your purchased product to other devices or make the experience easier.
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(Anonymous) 2015-06-22 03:24 pm (UTC)(link)Apple is capable of making some truly elegant and easy to use software. Many examples of this exist and even someone who is not an Apple Fanboy, such as myself, can recognize the ability of Apple to produce software with excellent user interface qualities.
Steve Jobs got the initial agreement from the music catalog companies to sell digital copies of their product (music) by producing a system that was airtight enough to persuade said companies that high quality digital copies of their songs would not be instantly and widely available. Also, he set a price point per song that seemed well within the discretionary impulse purchase price of almost everyone, $.99/song. Even after subtracting out the exhorbidant percentage Apple scoops off the top, this would equal the profitability of the music industry.
DRM was the key to this success. But DRM is not entirely understood by the public. DRM protected media is encrypted to protect the content from illegal distribution. But (and this is a huge but), whenever a company sues for illegal copying, they sue over breaking the encryption, not over the content. This allows the music catalog companies (via the RIAA) to sue people for infringement and never ever pay a single penny to the artist. After all, the lawyer isn't suing because a person illegally had a digital copy of a song, but because someone at some point illegally extracted the song from the encryption.
So, in reality, the purpose of iTunes software is to protect the arrangement between Apple and the various music catalog owners. It is designed to make it harder to access your purchased product and exercise what the Supreme Court has designated as 'fair use' because fair use does not allow you to break DRM encryption. For that reason, iTunes can't really implement many features that would allow you to copy your purchased product to other devices or make the experience easier.