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In fact, the tragedy is that Amazon could have built this store 10 years ago — the music labels simply wouldn’t allow it. What’s happened now is that the music label executives — at least at Universal and EMI — have finally gotten it through their thick skulls that it’s the iPod that drives iTunes sales, not the other way around. Apple’s FairPlay DRM isn’t (at least primarily) some sort of lock-in scheme to force people to buy iPods; FairPlay was a requirement stipulated by the labels, without which they would not have allowed Apple to sell their music at all.

By the way, if you install the amazonmp3 downloader, you get a free Apples in Stereo song to (a) test that the downloader works correctly, and (b) force you to walk through the process of buying an amazonmp3 track for the first time. Objective (b) is enormously effective in lowering any residual cognitive barriers to buying tracks over the Web (as opposed to the iTMS). Minor gripe with the process: Even though the track is free, Amazon will demand that you supply a credit card and billing address (presumably this is because the amazonmp3 store is US-only at the moment, as enforced by those bits of info).

You might recall that, several months ago, I went a little nuts about the iTunes 7 UI. To this day, I stand by my complaints, though I freely admit that my tone could have benefited from some moderation.

The ThinkMac blog (which, by the way, posted their own gripe about many of the same things I objected to) observed over the weekend that several of the most glaring inconsistencies were tidied up in iTunes 7.3. (For those keeping score, these are gripes #2 and #4c in the original dissection, plus the subsequent discovery of the impossible-to-hit pane resizer.)

Thanks, iTunes UI team!

The Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, last week notified Apple that it will not renew its annual contract to sell music through iTunes […] Instead, Universal said that it would market music to Apple at will, a move that could allow Universal to remove its songs from the iTunes service on short notice if the two sides do not agree on pricing or other terms in the future.

Much has been said about the general state of affairs between Apple and the music labels (who needs whom, who’s exploiting whom, the impact of iTunes on the various bottom lines, etc.), so I’ll skip all that and put this very plainly.

Here, in order of increasing cost to me (annoyance + time + money), are the ways in which I am prepared to acquire new music:

1. Purchase from iTunes.
2. Other methods of acquisition. (Sharing disks with friends, or in rare circumstances, p2p file sharing.)
3. Buy a physical CD.

Something for you to think about, Universal.

FYI: iTunes 7.0.1 is now available on the iTunes site and via Software Update. (25.7 MB) No technote yet, but this is what SWUpdate has to say:

iTunes 7.0.1 addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more.

Update: How are you supposed to be able to turn off the MiniStore pane? Is there a “Close” button that I’m not seeing (maybe somewhere off the right-hand end of my screen’s 1024 pathetic pixels)? The pane I see offers a “Turn on MiniStore” button, but offers nothing in the way of a “No, thanks, go away” button. The window helpfully indicates the presence of a menu item to make the pane go away, but this is supremely irritating (given that all other iTunes panes can be opened and closed using window controls).

Update 2: Well, iT7 continues to lock my PowerBook up hard. [Background: Yes, I (stupidly) decided that a new iTunes version was a great opportunity to move my (meager, 14G) music library from the trusty old iMac to my PowerBook. I did this by dragging the library folder over AFP into iT7 running on the PB. Now, whenever I start iTunes 7, the PowerBook grinds to a halt, two-thirds of the way through the gapless-playback detection phase. Yes, the whole machine bogs down, quickly reaching a point where it stops responding to respond to any input events. A three-fingered salute is required.] I had hoped that the 7.0.1 update would fix this; it hasn’t. Now I’ve rebooted and, what’s this? My Spotlight indices have been destroyed. I’m watching the stupid magnifying glass pulse its way () through my hard disk, making everything ridiculously slow as it does so. I was trying to work, dammit!

Ex-Be dope Mike Popovic takes my critique of iTunes 7 to the next level:

Other reviews of the iTunes 7 user interface are starting to roll in. Andy Matuschak says, simply, “What.” Rory Prior: a “death knell for Aqua”. Michael Tsai: “internally inconsistent and ugly”.

The benefit of waiting a few hours to chime in, I guess, is that you have time to carefully weigh your criticism and make it constructive. You know, instead of being all cranky and grumpy, like I was.

Update: David Chartier at TUAW has a series of articles walking through the new stuff in iTunes 7: big features, small features. Also, Dan Lurie seems pretty pleased about the demise of Aqua.

Update 2: Josh Buhler pokes a little harder at the scrollbars; Bruce Elgort appreciates the streamlined UI, once you get past the little issue of not knowing where your buttons are.

Update 3 (9/17): Daniel Wilson digs deep into color choices, interaction quirks, and lousy dialog button labels.

You probably saw that iTunes 7 is out (now apparently dubbed the “iTunes Jukebox,” presumably to contrast it from the iTunes Music Store). If you’ve installed it, you know that the user interface has changed. Again. There are plenty of improvements (off the top of my head: inclusion of CoverFlow, gapless playback^*), and reverse sync), but slopped atop all the new features is a thick coat of downright amateurish cosmetic adjustments.

By and large, iTunes seems to have been beaten with the same ugly stick that did such a number on Mail.app. (Oh, wait, I cribbed that line last year.) What’s different this time is that the stick must have been dipped in some of the Pro apps, and maybe iWork, before swinging around to hit the iTunes piñata again.

Therefore, let me present iTunes 7, Dissected: a catalog of all the inconsistencies, gripes, and irritations I experienced in the first ten minutes after upgrading.

high-res: PDF (mirror); low-res: JPEG (mirror)

Make no mistake: I still love iTunes. I think that’s why these quirks grate on me so much—the rough edges on anything you really care about are particularly abrasive—and why I felt compelled to disgruntle myself.

Feel free to disgruntle yourself in the comments.

Update: Welcome, Linked List readers. (And, uh, yeah, I guess I am being a bit…er, vitriolic. I gripe because I care!)

Thanks to this hint and Sony-Ericsson’s HID tool (warning: very buggy), I was able to bang together a quick and dirty iTunes Bluetooth remote control (for the Bt-enabled Z520a): ds-iTunes.hid. Send this to your phone (Bluetooth OBEX will do) and it ought to be usable immediately. The UI is passable but reasonably blurry and ugly; this is what you get for creating it entirely in Interface Builder with Unicode dingbats for button icons, and then scaling it down to fit the phone’s display. (Like I said, Q&D.) I haven’t tried the keystrokes on iTunes for Windows, so some of them might not translate quite right. You’ll have to try it and let me know.