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Oh, and I left out Big Reason C, perhaps the biggest reason of all: Apple doesn't build a web app to sell music because several of their big recording company contracts don't let them sell DRM-free music.

Apple is being deliberately constrained from competing with Amazon by the record companies. They've decided to fight Apple's growing control of their industry by manipulating the market, allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free MP3s while refusing to give Apple the same terms. The recording industry is playing Amazon off against Apple in a spiteful attempt to maintain more control.

So: Apple can't sell much of their music without DRM, though they know as well as anyone else that DRM is a dead end. Selling DRM tracks through a Web app might not be impossible, but it certainly is difficult, and it's hard to believe it isn't a waste of time when Amazon is there to clean your clock in the marketplace (to say nothing of the P2P elephant in the room). Apple could put up a Web store that sells the DRM-free portion of their catalog while leaving the DRM-hobbled portion in iTunes, but it doesn't take Steve Jobs to see that as a spectacular marketing mistake.

You're missing the entire point. ALL that needs to be displayed is a page with some album art, a description of the thing, and a "Want this? Download iTunes!" button. Then Jeff Atwood can figure out what the heck he just clicked on in Twitter.

The full iTunes application still remains.

FYI Apple already has a web-based "what's hot on iTunes" thing on their site which is more or less just as simple to maintain.

Ah, I see. What we're asking for is an Apple-authored, Apple-hosted service to make it easier for Jeff Atwood to get free information from Apple without the risk of becoming an Apple customer.

I admit, it would be really, really useful to have a service which provided links to album information and cover art without asking you to download a special application. Perhaps that's why such services predate iTunes by six years, and were originally available as (anybody else remember this?) Gopher sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allmusic

I find it hard to blame Apple for not bothering to reinvent that wheel. What's the profit margin on it? And, for all I know, Apple isn't even contractually allowed to serve up album info and cover art outside of iTunes. Apple has signed a lot of stupid contracts (cough AT&T cough); it's part of the cost of being the ones who drag ancient monopolies kicking and screaming into the future.

Perhaps I wouldn't have misunderstood Atwood if he'd given his essay the proper title: "Why the people I follow on Twitter are anti-web for linking to a non-web resource when AllMusic is just sitting there."

"Ah, I see. What we're asking for is an Apple-authored, Apple-hosted service to make it easier for Jeff Atwood to get free information from Apple without the risk of becoming an Apple customer."

Information about music is marketing material for Apple. They're just doing a poor job of using it. I'm more likely to purchase a song if I can figure out what the iTunes link is pointing to instead of having to install a program first.

Your argument is fine and it could be absolutely true... provided the numbers back it up. What numbers do we need?

- The number of users who post iTunes links.

- The clickthrough rate.

- The number of users who click through on an iTunes link who don't have iTunes already.

- The percentage breakdown of the number of users who will react to the forbidding "you need iTunes" dialog by a) downloading iTunes; b) going away frustrated; c) going away frustrated and writing an angry blog post.

- The difference between the previous data and the data on the number of users who, presented with a nice informative page with a discreet "you can get this at iTunes" link, will a) download iTunes; b) go away happy; c) go away and buy the music from a competitor.

- The approximate value, in dollars gained or lost, of every scenario I just outlined.

- The cost of building and maintaining an additional web app (which, once built, can never be taken down) both in dollars and in loss of focus. Remember that this is Apple: Their general philosophy is to maintain focus by eschewing profitable but low-margin businesses and focusing on a select few high-margin businesses.

- The extent to which the existence of two separate Apple music information sites -- the music store and the Web Thingy -- confuses users and decreases the probability of sales across the entire Apple customer base. This is a hard one to measure, but a good usability lab would enjoy tackling it.

As it happens, I don't know any of these numbers. Apple, however, knows them all to some approximation, provided they have an analytics person on staff. So, when Apple decides to let AllMusic and Amazon have the free-music-information business to themselves, I'm not equipped to second-guess them.

Reinventing the wheel, in this case, could be seen as a way to direct traffic to a profitable business. Being the central point for people investigating or sharing information about music on web seems like it might possibly have some value too. As you said, maybe it is a business Apple is contractually precluded from entering. If it isn't, it would seem Apple could fairly easily leverage their existing resources to create it. As was implied by other posters, perhaps they are not because they do not wish to dilute the iTunes channel.

You laugh, but traditionally you get to see the merchandise before you decide buy it.

Then there's reason @ (@ comes before the letter A, right?) -

@) iPod is a closed proprietary gadget that can only be accessed using closed proprietary software. If iPod was open and standardized, the rest of your reasons would probably magically disappear.

I don't understand. If iPod was "open and standardized" in 1991, how would Apple have built an iTunes Music Store that would have provided the same experience?

Or are you arguing that instead, they should have built something using the "open and standardized" components of the day, precluding almost all of the functionality that made it successful?

I think you mean "2001", not "1991". </nitpick>

And I, too, find it funny that people are still arguing for Apple to pursue the business model that its nigh-extinct competitors were already pursuing in 2001 when the iPod came out.

iPod was "open and standardized" in 1991

1991 was a sweet year for the iPod and iTunes. I had no issues installing it on MS-DOS 4/Windows 3.1 but had a hard time with corrupted data when connecting it up via centronix cable (I think iTunes also used a dBase III back-end at the time).

:)

But you must admit, it looked great on a Hercules Graphics Adaptor.

Yeah, I really enjoying listening to my iPod during SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) in the 2nd grade.

But then my teacher took it away... muttering something about "kids these days and their technology from the future"

Not the gadget itself, but rather access to it. iPod/iTunes is an isolated system designed to lock you in, which makes sense from the business point of view, is legal, gives more confidence to content providers and after all, is beneficial to the company. That's OK.

I'm arguing that Apple wouldn't have to be anti-Web if iPod was more open and allowed any software to connect and exchange content with it. That's against the grain for Apple, I'm sure, but that's their problem, not mine. (And the irony is that I'm typing this on a Mac)

How is that against the grain for Apple? Apple is known for design and quality but I never thought of them as especially open. Sure, they argued for openness where it served them as a 3% player in the OS space, but now that they're a 70+% player in music, more openness would hurt them.

Openness hurts the big boys, so you hardly ever see the big boys pushing for it. Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).

> Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).

IIRC, Joel Spolsky called this "commoditizing your complement."

Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web

I'm not sure what you mean. Google is gradually opening its technology - you see one announcement after another these days.

And here lies the difference between Google and Apple: both benefited from the open-source world big time, except the former contributes back as an acknowledgement, and the latter contributes nothing.

What about WebKit and Darwin, to name a few?

Both are derived from non-Apple open-source projects and thus must be open.

Darwin at least has roots in BSD which does not obligate the user to open derived works.

That's the kernel... Darwin's userland is GNU.

Ah, you mean that Apple should release a system based on completely open standards, so that it can be easily cloned by former employees of Apple's own Chinese manufacturing partners and brought to market at a lower price? A process which, when iterated, will eventually shave margins down to razor-thin levels, lead to an erosion of good design and the proliferation of generic, bad design, and threaten to drive Apple out of its own industry?

That sure worked out well for IBM in the PC industry. Whereas the folks who specialized in selling closed, proprietary PC operating systems didn't do well at all.

Not that I wouldn't love a completely open music player that provided the same user experience as iTunes and the iPod. But, oddly, despite the existence of lots of cheap MP3 players, the majority of them have a kind of generic, bad design -- and those that don't sell at low enough volumes that they have trouble competing in price with iPods. And their market is fragmented enough that they don't achieve the kind of dominance that -- for example -- leads to podcast pages having a special button just for them, the way many pages have a special "listen with iTunes" button.

news.YC: May contain capitalism.

(p.s. You're totally right)

"It doesn't take a genius to figure out why iTunes is anti-web: iTunes was originally released in January 2001. The best-of-class web browser at the time was IE 5.5. IE6 was nine months in the future. Safari was two years in the future. Firefox 1.0 was nearly four years in the future. The XMLHttpRequest object had not been invented. The term "Ajax" was four years in the future, as was the first famous Ajax application, Google Maps."

Amazon seemed to do just fine. Apple could have as well. I don't think this was motivated by a desire to have a great UX that couldn't be achieved in browsers at the time (given that iTunes is just a glorified browser)... I think it was a desire to be proprietary (anti-web, if you will).