The personal website of Matt Henderson.
17 October 2006
I've been purchasing music from the Apple iTunes Store since it opened, and am sure that I'm single-handedly keeping them in business. Thinking about it (as a roaming mountain goat tried to climb into my car) this past weekend, it occured to me that the true value, for me, in the iTunes store is the discovery of new music, and the purchasing of blended lists of music (either iTunes Essential My Groove lists), or user-submitted playlists. I've discovered that I simply don't have the time, nor the knowledge of my own music collection, to create interesting playlists. I'd much rather leverage the time and effort of those much better qualified.
But there's a problem with the iTunes Store, that I believe represents a huge opportunity for Apple. And that is, probably with at least 80% of the playlists that I discover, I already own several of the songs in the collection, and end up not purchasing the list because I (a) don't want to repurchase something I already own, and (b) don't have the time to manually add the other songs to my shopping cart, and then later manually build the playlist in iTunes and add back the songs I already own.
Apple could solve this by detecting the songs I already own, and simply exclude those from the purchase (but not the list!) when I buy them from my shopping cart.
I've emailed Apple, and didn't get a reply. The last time I blogged about Apple, I was contacted within days. So, let's give it another try. :-)
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