venomous porridge - Mad About U2:
Music collections are deeply personal, and to young people, they can
be surprisingly wrapped up in identity. Back when CDs and cassettes were
the thing, my friends and I would collect and proudly house them in
elaborate alphabetized racks. Every cramped freshman dorm room had
several cubic feet devoted to this purpose. You wouldn’t visit a friend
for the first time without spending at least a few minutes arms folded,
waist bent, scanning tiny lettering on 25 or 50 or a couple hundred
plastic spines. It was smalltalk; it was a courtship display. Wait a
sec, you’re into Genesis?! Oh, just the early stuff. Cool, cool.
We’ve surrendered the physical trappings, but the connotations
remain. And I think Apple didn’t see this because — no matter how deeply
they insist music runs in their DNA — from the perspective of the iTunes Store, “library” means licensed content the user is currently authorized to stream or download.
But due to various design decisions Apple’s made over the years, that’s
not what it means to anyone else. I’d wager that to a majority of
iTunes users, “library” means my personally curated collection of stuff that I enjoy and feel comfortable associating with my identity. Messing with that is, to be frank, nothing short of a violation.