Apple doesn't care about music.
Last year, I wrote a few posts about the top 5 things in the digital music work that didn't happen in 2006. At the top of the list was "Apple didn't innovate". In that post I wrote:
Apple, the undisputed leader in the digital music world, with its stunning 85% market share, with more than a billion tracks sold, and the sole supplier of the coveted 'perfect thing' is spending less time on music and more time on video - expanding its iTunes empire to include TV and movies. This focus on video leaves few cycles left in Cupertino to devote to improving the music experience. This year Apple gave us music listeners a few crumbs: gapless playback, a slightly smarter shuffle, an album art browser and a minimal text search capability on its latest iPod. There are lots of things that Apple could have done but didn't. Apple didn't offer an 'all-you-can-eat' music subscription service. Apple didn't add music or taste sharing to iTunes or the iPod. Apple didn't improve iTunes music discovery tools to help get listeners beyond the short head - much less into the long tail. Apple didn't do much to help us find music on our own iPods - an iPod becomes the place where a song goes to die - 60% of songs on a typical iPod have never been listened to by its owner.
Not much has changed in a year. Apple gave us music listeners a few more crumbs: a touch screen interface, coverflow on the iPod, the ability to buy songs on the iPod, and some crazy Starbucks connection that we will never see in New Hampshire. Probably the biggest thing Apple did this year was to promote DRM-free music - they managed to sign up EMI (I still haven't found in DRM-free tracks in iTunes), but quickly lost the DRM-free race to AmazonMp3.com (which is now selling DRM-Free tracks from all of the major labels).
Apple is still foregoing incredible opportunities. Their recommendations really kind of suck , they don't try to do any of the wonderful things with social music that companies like Last.fm are doing. They still don't give us any tools to help us explore our music collection or to find new music in the iTunes store.
I'm writing this the evening before
the big 2008 MacWorld keynote. I'd really like to see Steve make
some big announcements around music. An all-you-can-eat
music subscription service that works on the iPod is at the top of my
list of things to hope for. I suspect, however, that I will
be disappointed. Steve conquered the music world 5 years ago, and
he's moved on to bigger things. My only real hope is that when the
iPhone SDK is released, we'll be able to write our own music apps.