Typically a user looks at software for what it does and how well it does it. But there are exceptions to the rule.
Sometimes functionality is not the only criteria, especially in cases where mechanics and marketing seem to carry equal weight.
We're talking about iTunes for Windows 7.3 and its dual functionality. It wants to play your music and videos, but mostly it wants to sell you more.
Up to now iTunes has done a successful job at shouldering this dual load. Users have catalogued their tunes, played them back, and cheerfully expanded their collections at the iTunes Store. One small gauge of success: Download.com claims over 4.5 million downloads of the software.
With its latest iteration, Apple has added support for the iPhone as well a new feature or two (video acquisition and playback) and attempted to redress a longstanding sore point (rights management).
The video function is spiffy, smoothly executed and about as user-friendly as one could hope. The steps required to buy a movie are essentially the same as those needed to snag a new tune in the Store. And there is plenty to shop for: iTunes claims to offer new and classic films from $9.99 along with 350 TV shows at $1.99 an episode, and an obscene number of music videos at about two bucks a pop.
With a reasonably speedy connection you'll capture an entire film is about half an hour — less than the time it takes us to do a Blockbuster run.
Another new feature allows users to bypass such media anesthetics as Hell's Kitchen and Apocalypto in favor of something a little more enlivening. Billed as iTunes U, this is the service wherein Apple makes its Store resources available to universities looking to broadcast faculty lectures as free podcasts.
Want to catch a lecture series on philosophy from Stanford University or a physics program from the University of California Berkeley? Such fare can be downloaded with ease and swiftness. Whatever guardians of culture may be left to us surely will view this as a tantalizing offset to the Store's efforts to make Agent Cody Banks and Congo more readily available to the viewing public.
The Digital Rights Management Battle
Speaking of availability, this seems an apt place to ponder Apple's more daring move in the latest version of iTunes, which comes in the area of digital rights management or DRM. This is where mechanics crash head on into marketing.
Advocates say DRM simply protects intellectual property, making it impossible to copy or distribute copyrighted material. Opponents have said that DRM, and especially Apple's proprietary system of rights management, restrict their ability to listen to music they have purchases. Apple's DRM has been criticized for making it hard to play iTunes music on anything other than an iPod.
Apple has made a hearty effort to resolve the issue. Got a problem with DRM? Now you can pay a little extra to buy non-DRM songs from the Store. With no usage restrictions and a higher-quality playback, these "iTunes Plus" songs cost about 30 cents more per track than their protected siblings.
A user who buys a DRM-free song has the option of specifying that all future purchases be DRM-free. Songs already purchased can be upgraded to non-DRM format, if the Plus version is available. The unrestricted library already includes classics such as John Coltrane and Paul McCartney, alongside contemporary artists like Coldplay and Norah Jones.
All this falls roughly under the heading of marketing, and it's no small measure of iTunes' usefulness. A substantial reason this software exists is to push product out to users and DRM-free formatting is just one more way to do that.
For the sales side to work, the mechanics of the software have to work impeccably, and by and large iTunes meets the mark. One snazzy feature is Cover Flow, a visual tool that lets a user flip through CD covers just as one might browse a physical collection of discs. Creating playlists is likewise easy and intuitive: Drag a song from an existing folder into a playlist and the list forms, ready to be sorted by song name, artist, genre and other criteria.
Some of iTunes' most popular features remain intact in the latest version, in particular the ease with which iTunes synchs up with Apple's iPod. Not that there was much doubt in that department. iTunes' eagerness to sell music is surpassed only by its inherent intention to sell more of Apple's personal music players.
Sure you can put iTunes music on many Motorola phones. Yes, you can burn iTunes playlists onto CDs. And with the removal of DRM it also is possible now to move iTunes data more easily onto a third-party digital music player.
But the iTunes site and all its documentation make it clear that the iPod remains the preferred mode of transport. After all, Apple is not in the music business, not really. Apple is in the device business. iTunes is here, ultimately, to move more iPods.
Apple would like us to buy its music and to use its near-ubiquitous music player. Fine. People are free to choose.
But surely we can do without the babysitting.
The iTunes music store flags "explicit" tracks. Users can put a lock on any items with a Parental Advisory Label (from the Recording Industry Association of America); movies that don't have a specific rating (from the Motion Picture Association of America); or TV shows that don't have a specific rating (from TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board).
The ongoing corporate effort to Protect The Children continues, with iTunes joining the ranks of self-appointed Babysitters out to protect us from ourselves, to shift our parental duties onto the shoulders of the cyber-guardians.
