Confessions of an iTunes Dork

(Thinkstock, modified by Yahoo Tech)

I am an iTunes dork.

I have well over 15,000 songs in my iTunes library, and I have rated every single one via iTunes’ one-to-five-star system. I have meticulously tagged every song in my collection according to genre and other data points.

I go song by song deciding what, for example, is funk, alternative, R&B, or avant garde — according to my own criteria. I differentiate between jazz and jazz with vocals. I invent genres that make sense only to me: swingy, modern, classique, atmospheric. I distinguish between rock and “moderate rock” according to my own taste. I use the term “lo fi” to signal something that has nothing to do with how rock critics use the phrase.

And I chuckle at artists who labeled their music “Unclassifiable.” Oh, really? Watch this!

More than a decade ago, iTunes turned one of my passionate hobbies (listening to music) into something that looks an awful lot like work.

And I love it.

I love it even though more and more of us are switching from downloading to streaming, embracing services from Pandora to Spotify to SoundCloud. While we still spend more on music downloads, the latest figures from the Recording Industry Association of America reinforce the trend — streaming revenue is up 28 percent over the past six months, while download revenue has fallen 12 percent.

I love it even though I’ve drifted toward the streaming stream myself, without ever giving it much thought. After all, there are plenty of free (ad-supported), easy-to-use services with impressive music catalogs. And over the years, iTunes has become an increasingly bloated and irritating piece of software, overloaded with features nobody asked for.

Despite all of this, I remain an iTunes dork. And I am not ashamed of my iTunes dorkhood.

I repeat: I am an iTunes dork. And I love it.

Changing the tunes
If the shift toward streaming music — instead of owning it — continues, it will be the third such transition I’ve endured.

As a young music fan, I resisted the move from vinyl to compact disc largely for economic reasons: Pricier CDs severely tested my budget and didn’t sound that much better to my ears.

Of course I eventually capitulated. And when the digital download arrived on the scene, I was all in. Hopefully I won’t get in trouble for admitting now that I was a happy user of the original Napster, and a LimeWire enthusiast after that. More to the point, I was thrilled when, in 2003, Apple introduced iTunes, which was profoundly superior to other desktop digital music players of that era, the names of which I can’t even remember.

There were a bunch of reasons for this, but here’s the biggie, in one word and image: metadata.

When iTunes first appeared, I scrolled through my library, inventing genres, applying tags. When I realized the Comments field could be used to tag songs that fit more than one genre, and that the Grouping field offered still further possibilities … well, many hours were lost.

For a certain kind of tech enthusiast — a dorky one — figuring out endless ways to build and tweak custom lists is another delightful time suck. Using those extra fields, I could add relevant metadata that had nothing to do with genre — adding an “@” to the Comments field of songs with offensive language, or “New Orleans” to the Grouping field of songs I associated with the city.

I became even more obsessive when iTunes added so-called “smart playlists” — designed for building automated playlists that leveraged this metadata.

An all instrumental list? Easy. How about a funky instrumental list? How about an “atmospheric” instrumental list? Doable — and tweakable: Narrow to include just five-star songs, auto-updating to present least-recently-listened-to selections. A swingy, New Orleans-focused playlist that won’t accidentally serve up expletives while guests are stopping by? No problem. You get the idea.

And obviously I also needed a smart playlist to help me make sure that every new song I added to iTunes was thoroughly tagged before being fully absorbed into my digital music collection.

I wasn’t the only person who fell down this rabbit hole. In the old days I used to frequent SmartPlaylists.com — which doesn’t seem particularly active now — to pick up tips for clever list-making strategies from fellow iTunes dorks. Once in a blue moon I even crossed paths in real life with fellow metadata obsessives: We smirked at iPod users who complained about the device repeating certain songs too often — a problem easily avoided with the simplest smart playlist, sheesh!

And yet … the joke would turn out to be on us. In reality, most people don’t want to turn their music consumption into an epic personal project. And listening was about to get a whole lot easier. Even for me.

Play it again
In 2004, I spent more than $800 on music — both in iTunes and CDs. So far in 2014, I’ve spent around $92. (I am also a Quicken dork, but that’s another story.) I add to my iTunes library in other ways, such as songs available for download on SoundCloud, or parsing online projects like The Pop Cop’s Music Alliance Pact (featuring downloadable recommendations from bloggers around the world), and so on.

But now when I listen to a music-focused podcast and hear a clip of something interesting, it’s often easier to hear more on Spotify.

But while setting up a new Sonos speaker this weekend, I realized I didn’t just want it to stream. I wanted access to my iTunes library. To me, at least, the many hours I’ve spent as an iTunes dork added more value than all the technical wizardry built into Spotify and Pandora put together. Sure, those services have their merits. But, at the end of the day, nobody is better at picking the music I want to hear than I am.

The futzing involved was worth it. Ah! There it all was! All of my 134 playlists and, um, 116 smart playlists. That’s a little embarrassing to admit. But, hey, my iTunes library is awesome to me, and that’s the whole point.

Plus, this collection of owned digital music has none of the holes that bedevil streaming services. I can listen to most of my “covers” playlist on Spotify, for example, but some selections are blocked for digital-rights-management reasons. Others are available only because they live in the iTunes library on my computer — so why not just listen to that?

Perhaps it’s ironic that a Sonos speaker reminded me of the pleasures of iTunes, which is something we all discovered in concert with another bit of hardware — the iPod.

That landmark device sparked a wave of nostalgia recently when Apple discontinued the last model based on the original “click wheel” design. Many observers made the obvious point that the iPod in all its forms is looking like an endangered species in an era when playing music is just another feature on most smartphones.

And how long, really, can iTunes as we know it truly survive? Even Apple seems pessimistic — creating its own streaming service and acquiring another one when it bought Beats.

So perhaps my days of being an iTunes dork are, fundamentally, numbered. But I’m happy to have been reminded of the form’s real pleasures for as long as I can enjoy them.

After all, I’m one of those people who never did liquidate my vinyl collection. Even now there’s stuff in that stash you can’t find online! In fact, maybe I need to get busy converting some of those rarities to digital form.

I can tag them up in iTunes and incorporate them into my smart playlists — while there’s still time.

Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.