iTunes 9 to take on Pandora, subscription services?
iTunes 8, announced Tuesday, introduces a couple of things that point toward a future in which Apple branches out beyond its pay-as-you-go buying model for media. Are these a harbinger of new buying options that will appear in iTunes 9?
Genius List
iTunes has had a "Party Shuffle" function for quite a while, with which it dynamically builds a playlist from your music on your hard drive. It was not (so far as I could tell) particularly intelligent about how it picked out what to play, however--Chemical Brothers could be immediately followed by Dave Brubek. It was essentially a glorified shuffle mode.
With iTunes 8, Apple has introduced the Genius List, which communicates with a cloud server about the contents of your music collection, then does fancy some background intelligence so that when you give iTunes a seed song, it is able to build out an automatically running playlist in which the songs have more of a similar character. And what's great is that you can do this on the iPod, independent of iTunes.
While a seemingly small thing, this actually fixes one of my peeves about iTunes--when you want something more tailored than a full shuffle but you don't want to switch to radio, how do you do it? iTunes has always had a fairly black-and-white approach--it's random, or it's exactly what you asked for. There was no in-between. Genius List fills this middle ground without the hassle of creating mood-specific playlists.
This is clearly treading into the same territory on which Pandora has built its reputation, though for the time being, Apple is mum on how the algorithms are doing their magic. Apple is currently restricting the Genius List to the contents of your current library, while Pandora is, of course, a streamed service that introduces you to new music and artists.
This brings us to...
The Genius Sidebar
The Genius Sidebar goes outside your library to introduce you to algorithmically generated recommendations from the iTunes Store. Again, Apple isn't saying much about how this is done, other than explaining that it bases recommendations on looking at your collection, as well as others' (so the more people that take part, the smarter it gets).
At the moment, these recommendations are available only with the usual 30-second preview, but it seems like just a short hop to get to a full streaming, subscription-based approach, living in parallel with the pay-per-song approach Apple has successfully used so far. Rumors have been around for ages that Apple will introduce a subscription service, and the Genius Sidebar seems like a simple way to step into that approach.
Most of the subscription services tried so far have done rather poorly to terribly for various reasons: price point, confusing DRM, confusing interface, lack of content, or just not having a critical mass of users to sustain them. If anyone can make it work, Apple can, and my guess is that iTunes is its step toward a full-blown subscription service in 6 to 12 months.
Adam Richardson is the director of product strategy at Frog Design, where he guides strategy engagements for Frog's international roster of clients, envisioning and creating new products, consumer electronics, and digital experiences. Adam combines a background in industrial design, interaction design, and sociology, and he spends most of his time on convergent designs that combine hardware, software, service, brand, and retail. He writes and speaks extensively on design, business, culture, and technology, and he runs his own Richardsona blog. Adam is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
hope it works as advertised
I would love to see iTunes add new functionality to restrict the size of a play list - and randomize it as well
basically I want to create a new playlist to download to my 80 gig pod or my nano
based on amount of space I have/make available on the device without having to pick through my 150+ gig music library
make this function on any data field
ie artist, genre etc...
so that I can randomly allocate 5 gig to jazz, 20 gig to blues, 10 gig to opera, 20 gig to rock, 5 gig to Tea Party etc....
seems that iTunes usability was optimized for smaller hit based databases and has not kept pace with the library expansion of its user base
Now that would be GENIUS
1) tell your ipod to copy over specific playlists you are making
2) create a smart playlist that is with this criteria?. Genre is _________, last played is not in the last 30 days, limit to ______ gigabytes
3) tell your ipod to shuffle songs (in settings)
That is genius?.you are not.
I downloaded the new itunes last night, but with the extremely long Genius process, i wasn't able to try it out and went to sleep instead... still looking forward to it... i've got tons of album's that i've yet to listen to more than a few songs, this should give me a good opportunity to branch out with music i already have...
This app "hijacks" the audio from other applications, such as Safari, and re-routes the audio to your airport express.
The only thing that bothers be about Airfoil is that there is about a 1 to 2 second latency or delay. While this doesn't matter most of the time, it is totally unusable when playing video games.
ps - study the history of music-on-demand to learn where things are headed! It's exciting things...
Its ridiculous to have a person in 2008 that has not fiddled with the application enough.
iTunes doesn't allow you to do this?
- by LunaticSX September 11, 2008 3:19 PM PDT
- "it seems like just a short hop to get to a full streaming, subscription-based approach ... Rumors have been around for ages that Apple will introduce a subscription service"
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(15 Comments)Based on no credible evidence whatsoever, just other stories like this one.
What is it with tech journalists and their obsession with subscription music?
"Didn't happen this time, but this must be an indicator it'll happen NEXT time!""
Is it just so they can finally say "Hah! We were right all along! Subscription music is the way to go!"? Or maybe so they can say "iTunes and iPods are finally getting a feature that the Zune has had all along"? Maybe they all had some favorite subscription service that died and they're longing for a come back?
Look, give it up. The market has spoken, and per-song purchasing has clearly won. The iTunes Music Store proved it, and Amazon's MP3 Store is reinforcing it. Amazon only sells DRM-free songs, and subscription music requires DRM, so there's no way you're going to see them adopt any kind of subscription plan.
Or do tech writers really WANT more DRM out there? Maybe just so they can complain about it?
Apple added movie rentals because it makes sense that you might only want to watch a movie once, and would be more willing to pay a fraction of the purchase price to do so.
Subscription music plans only make sense to a tiny percentage of the market, and Apple doesn't cater to fractional markets with their music offerings. (Otherwise they would have built a radio into iPods a long time ago. FWIW, the iPod Radio Remote is still available, and Apple made sure the new 4G Nanos and 120 GB Classic still include support for it, but it's not exactly on the best sellers list on the Apple Store website.)