I purchased an 867 MHz PowerBook G4 in late 2002 or early 2003. One of the applications I immediately started using was iTunes. Using the built-in Superdrive I slowly imported more and more of my music collection. iTunes became the Music app in 2019 with the release of MacOS Catalina (10.15).
The interface and features of Apple’s music application has undergone a lot of change in 25 years (iTunes was released in January 2001). Some changes I appreciated and others I’m was not as happy about. The most recent change that I’m unhappy about is the “artist-related recommendations” that appear in the “Now Playing” display. While the marketing may be that these are personal recommendations based on my listening preferences, to me they are advertisements.
I am a huge fan of Apple’s products. I am not a fan of some of the outwardly capitalistic stances they have taken in recent years. For a long time Apple was a hardware company that made outstanding products, and the software that enabled those products. The synergy afforded by having absolute control over both the physical and digital aspects of these products gave them a unique position in the personal computing space.
Growth (in terms of revenue) slowed as the market became saturated with Apple products, and as new products and new software advances have slowed. Apple turned to services as a source of revenue. Subscription offerings like Apple Music, or Apple TV, or iCloud. With burgeoning collections of movies, music, audiobooks, and digital books against fixed storage sizes on personal computers, cloud storage became the defacto way to have more media than you could store on your device. Streaming content (for a monthly subscription) meant you could have access to hundreds of movies or television episodes, without having to buy them individually. Streaming is a form of lock-in; if you want to see the movie “Greyhound” you have to subscribe to Apple TV.
Apple would love for us all to buy as much iCloud storage as possible, and to pay for an Apple Music subscription, and to subscribe every month to Apple TV. While these may be good technical solutions, they are not desirable solutions for me. I like to own my media, be it books, movies, or music. I would much rather buy a CD or DVD than a digital copy of media. I can make a digital copy myself. Amazon Kindle books feel leased rather than owned. Streamed content is rented. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a one-sided agreement you make when you don’t personally own the media.
Surveillance marketing uses data collected from your browsing history, or purchase history, or viewing habits, or listening habits to target you with ads or offerings your prior behavior indicates you are more likely to purchase. Knowing that my habits are being surveilled is one thing, having that surveillance thrown in your face in the form of “artist-related recommendations” generated from my playing music, imported from a CD I own, is another thing entirely.
A couple of months ago I became aware of Petrichor, an “offline macOS music player”. I had downloaded it and explored it for a few minutes and then forgotten about it. Until about a 5 weeks ago I had been working from home. In the quiet of our house I didn’t find it necessary to block distractions through headphones and music. My employer has called us back to the office full-time, so I am once again spending a significant portion of my work day listening to music. Seeing the “recommendations” (ads) in the Music app made me remember Petrichor this morning. It may not be as polished as Apple’s Music app, but it doesn’t surveil your either. There are no analytics or tracking of how you use the application. Your media stays untouched (I intensely dislike that Kindle and Nook will update the book cover image from what it was when I bought the book, to some new image simply because there is now a movie based on the book.).
Time to switch from Apple Music, time to try something with a different philosophy, time to make my habits a tiny bit less surveilled.