I take the CDs home and listen to them on my stereo, and I’ve burned a few hundred of the best albums to my Mac and iPhone, which is really more than enough. I enjoy the slow savoring of new music, listening to the radio to discover new bands (shout out to ), the purchase of physical CDs at my local, independently-owned record store–where I can meet people and talk about music. Basically you give up the burden of managing your gigabytes at the cost of having to ask someone to use those bytes every time you want to access them.Personally, I am content. There is no doubt that if you can afford it, and if it is available and you feel you can trust the cloud provider, that it is the more convenient solution *by far*. Of course, this is not without a serious cost: carriers charge a premium for fast wireless bandwidth, there are plenty of situations where a connection will not be available, and there are autonomy/control/privacy issues. In that sense, iTunes is just a fancy file-system browser that allows the user to manage gigabytes of data and adds powerful metadata that file-systems don’t support.Apple chose iTunes to manage their iDevices because a) iTunes already existed, and b) iTunes already knows about most of the artifacts (music, apps) you’ll want to move on and off your devices, putting it in a natural position to manage the subset of your data you want to copy to your devices.The advent of fast wireless networks and streaming media services creates an alternative to moving large gigabyte batches of media between devices. The central realization is that iTunes generates and maintains links to files on your hard drive. ITunes is a bad piece of software, but with a little thought it can be a lot better.
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