Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I heart radio and I love
Speaker 1: all things tech. And first and foremost, my apologies if
Speaker 1: my voice starts to give out throughout this episode. Between
Speaker 1: when I recorded the first part of the iTunes Story,
Speaker 1: which came out before this episode, and this part the
Speaker 1: second part of the iTunes story, I got a terrible
Speaker 1: summer cold, and so I am on the mend. I was,
Speaker 1: I was just fighting it off when I recorded the
Speaker 1: first half, and now I'm getting it, you know, getting
Speaker 1: out the other side on the second half. So my
Speaker 1: apologies for the particularly grossness of my voice today. But
Speaker 1: the show she must keep going, I think, as the saying.
Speaker 1: And in our last episode, I covered the developments and
Speaker 1: launch of iTunes in two thousand one, when the program
Speaker 1: first launched, up to the point when Apple would introduce
Speaker 1: the iTunes Music store in two thousand three, and I
Speaker 1: also focused quite a bit on Apple's history leading up
Speaker 1: to that and why it would be such a big
Speaker 1: deal for iTunes to premiere. The company had managed to
Speaker 1: convince the music industry to take a chance on selling
Speaker 1: songs a la carte for cents a pop, and the
Speaker 1: record labels had little to lose and agreed with some
Speaker 1: conditions which I talked about. But in two thousand four,
Speaker 1: Apple expanded the iTunes Music Store internationally. It had started
Speaker 1: off as only being available in the United States, but
Speaker 1: next on the list of countries to join iTunes Music
Speaker 1: Store where France, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Austria, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg,
Speaker 1: and the Netherlands the Great White North. But by which
Speaker 1: of course I mean our buddy Canada had to wait
Speaker 1: a few months later. They got iTunes music store support
Speaker 1: starting December third, two thousand four, so just at the
Speaker 1: very tail end of the year. Now over the following
Speaker 1: year's Apple would continue to expand operations into new markets,
Speaker 1: which greatly contributed to the increase in revenue through the
Speaker 1: iTunes Music Store. Then we have iTunes version five, which
Speaker 1: debuted on September seven, two thousand five, And it was
Speaker 1: this version of iTunes that would set the stage for
Speaker 1: my career because it was iTunes five that adds support
Speaker 1: for a young form of media called podcasts. Now, technically
Speaker 1: podcasts were available on iTunes before version five came out.
Speaker 1: They had been added to the music store about three
Speaker 1: months earlier with an update called iTunes four point five.
Speaker 1: But it was really upon the release of iTunes five
Speaker 1: that people started to really hear about it and just
Speaker 1: to let you guys, peek behind the curtain a little bit,
Speaker 1: where your show appeared on iTunes if you were a podcaster,
Speaker 1: that was a huge deal back in those days. Arguably
Speaker 1: it still is, but I mean back then it was
Speaker 1: make or break. There weren't as many podcatching services back then,
Speaker 1: or at least not many high profile ones, so getting
Speaker 1: your show featured on the podcast page of the iTunes
Speaker 1: store could mean going from obscure to famous in very
Speaker 1: short order. To get featured, someone at Apple had to
Speaker 1: take notice of you, and it really helped if you
Speaker 1: happen to be really good, which is why my colleagues
Speaker 1: Josh and Chuck, hosts of Stuff you Should Know, got
Speaker 1: featured on iTunes pretty early on, just a few months
Speaker 1: after they had launched Stuff you Should Know, and that
Speaker 1: propelled them to the spotlight where they flourished. My show
Speaker 1: has appeared in the top ten technology podcasts frequently over
Speaker 1: the years, sometimes even reaching number one on occasion. I
Speaker 1: remember taking a screenshot the first time that happened because
Speaker 1: I was chuffed two bits, so to speak. The algorithms
Speaker 1: to determine placement in the top in We're never really
Speaker 1: entirely apparent, but it became clear that showing up on
Speaker 1: those pages really helped bring an audience to the show.
Speaker 1: Another feature introduced between versions four and five, but really
Speaker 1: emphasized in five, was Party Shuffle, which does not describe
Speaker 1: the type of dancing I do when I'm at a
Speaker 1: social gathering, although that would also be accurate. No. A
Speaker 1: party Shuffle would create a shuffled playlist, so instead of
Speaker 1: keeping the next song a mystery where you would have
Speaker 1: a song playing and you have no idea what's coming
Speaker 1: up next, the feature would actually take a list of
Speaker 1: songs and shuffle the order so that the user could
Speaker 1: actually still see the full list of songs, and that
Speaker 1: gave users the option of customizing a shuffled playlist and
Speaker 1: moving songs or even removing them completely from the queue.
Speaker 1: So you might have a nice list of songs and
Speaker 1: you think I don't even know what order to play
Speaker 1: these in so you could use party Shuffle. It would
Speaker 1: automatically randomize the order of that list, and then you
Speaker 1: can look over and make sure that still, you know,
Speaker 1: seems like a good party mix. It's pretty handy if
Speaker 1: you're building a playlist for a party and if you
Speaker 1: don't want six slow jams playing back to back. Eventually,
Speaker 1: this feature would evolve into something else called iTunes DJ,
Speaker 1: but that's uh slightly more complicated story that I might
Speaker 1: touch on a little later in this episode. Similarly, Apple
Speaker 1: had also introduced a service called air Tunes, which allowed
Speaker 1: users to stream audio from one WiFi connected device running iTunes.
Speaker 1: So really we're talking about a Mac computer because this
Speaker 1: is really before the iPhone and iPod touch eras, and
Speaker 1: then you could stream that to another WiFi connected device.
Speaker 1: Around that same time, Apple also introduced a piece of
Speaker 1: hardware called the Airport Express. It's a wireless access point
Speaker 1: that also had an audio output jack. So you could
Speaker 1: stream music from your Mac computer to your Airport Express outlet,
Speaker 1: and you could have speakers plugged into that outlet and
Speaker 1: you could play music in a different room. So that
Speaker 1: was the basic idea. You also had to have an
Speaker 1: ethernet cable plugged into that airport express. But it was
Speaker 1: a way that you could expand or extend the way
Speaker 1: you could play music through a space, So it was
Speaker 1: an interesting idea. Now. Later Apple would evolve air Tunes
Speaker 1: into a similar service called Airplay, which eventually could handle
Speaker 1: all sorts of media, not just audio streaming. I'll talk
Speaker 1: about that a bit later too. By the time iTunes
Speaker 1: five point oh came out, the Apple Music Store played
Speaker 1: host to more than two million songs, ten times the
Speaker 1: number that the store had opened with back in two
Speaker 1: thousand three oh and Steve Jobs had a new type
Speaker 1: of hardware to show off at that particular music event.
Speaker 1: It was what he called the iTunes phone, also known
Speaker 1: as the Rocker E one R O k R, was
Speaker 1: a phone made by Motorola that users could port songs
Speaker 1: from iTunes onto. But the Rocker would turn into a
Speaker 1: painful lesson for Jobs and for Apple. First of all,
Speaker 1: the phone was not very impressive to look at, and
Speaker 1: you can tell when Steve Jobs was showing it off
Speaker 1: at this event that he wasn't really feeling it. The
Speaker 1: phone looked a bit cheap. If I'm going to be honest,
Speaker 1: It was a candy bar style phone format from the
Speaker 1: old cell phone days, so it was a cell phone,
Speaker 1: it was not really a smartphone. It could only hold
Speaker 1: about a hundred songs, and you had to transfer music
Speaker 1: from a computer to the phone via a cable, so
Speaker 1: you actually had to put the phone and plug it
Speaker 1: into your computer and then manually poured over the songs
Speaker 1: the one hundred or a fewer songs you wanted onto
Speaker 1: the phone. And it was only available on singular wireless,
Speaker 1: which meant that users would have to get locked into
Speaker 1: a contract with a specific provider if they wanted to
Speaker 1: use this technology. Also, during the demonstration itself, the phone
Speaker 1: simply refused to operate as it was supposed to, and
Speaker 1: Jobs got visibly irritated on stage. This presentation is still
Speaker 1: available for you to watch on YouTube if you want to.
Speaker 1: It's the Music event from two thousand and five. He
Speaker 1: tried to show how the phone could pick up right
Speaker 1: after you left off listening and was failing miserably and
Speaker 1: made some comment akin too, well, if you can know
Speaker 1: what buttons to push, you can make it work. The
Speaker 1: iPod Nano, which Jobs also unveiled at that same event,
Speaker 1: fared much better. It was in line with Apple's aesthetic
Speaker 1: plus it you know, worked, Jobs suspected that phones were
Speaker 1: going to be a big threat to the iPod business
Speaker 1: before long. He was absolutely right. Phones already had cameras
Speaker 1: in them and some rudimentary web browsers, though these were
Speaker 1: mostly text based, and that was why he had agreed
Speaker 1: to work with another company to create the so called
Speaker 1: iTunes phone in the first place. It's the only reason
Speaker 1: he agreed to it. But he saw that when things
Speaker 1: were outside his control, he couldn't expect them to measure
Speaker 1: up to his standards. So you could argue that the
Speaker 1: lackluster demonstration of the Rocker in two thousand five is
Speaker 1: what pushed Jobs to create a department within Apple to
Speaker 1: develop the iPhone in the first place, although surely the
Speaker 1: development process was already far enough along at that point. Now.
Speaker 1: According to numerous sources and Apple itself, version five point
Speaker 1: oh had some bugs in it that caused issues for
Speaker 1: many users. The company issued a patch, but the full
Speaker 1: version of iTunes six wouldn't be far behind. It would
Speaker 1: release on October twelve, two thousand five, so essentially a
Speaker 1: little more than a month after version five came out.
Speaker 1: Version five in September, version six in October. So version
Speaker 1: five added some features and made a few changes to
Speaker 1: the user interface, but version six had a bit more
Speaker 1: to offer, and that's when video would come to iTunes.
Speaker 1: Starting with version six, users would be able to purchase
Speaker 1: music videos or episodes of certain television shows for the
Speaker 1: princely sum of a dollar ninety nine. And it was
Speaker 1: a good idea, boosted by the fact that MTV, which
Speaker 1: had built itself on top of showing music videos, had
Speaker 1: started to drift away from videos in favor of other programming.
Speaker 1: They had shown a decreasing amount of music video content
Speaker 1: year over year for several years running by this point,
Speaker 1: So now users would be able to watch music videos
Speaker 1: on demand, purchasing them for a pretty low price and
Speaker 1: keeping them forever. One thing did put a bit of
Speaker 1: a monkey wrench into the works, and that was YouTube.
Speaker 1: So in the early days of YouTube, this is back
Speaker 1: when YouTube was first launching, users were uploading all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff to the service. You know, it was meant
Speaker 1: to be a place where people would put user generated
Speaker 1: content of whether it was home videos or sketches or
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. But in the early days of YouTube,
Speaker 1: it was mostly done by people who had no rights
Speaker 1: to the videos they were uploading. They were uploading stuff
Speaker 1: that didn't belong to them. It got YouTube and some
Speaker 1: pretty hot water from various studios out there, music studios,
Speaker 1: movie studios, TV studios, but that might have hurt music
Speaker 1: video sales on iTunes because you could find a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff on YouTube, though it wasn't guaranteed to stay
Speaker 1: up for long. The TV shows, however, we're doing pretty well.
Speaker 1: The videos also included short films by Pixar, which had
Speaker 1: made several feature length computer animated films for Disney at
Speaker 1: that point but had not yet officially joined with the
Speaker 1: Mouse House yet, and Steve Jobs, by the way, was
Speaker 1: a major shareholder in the company. Jobs had invested in
Speaker 1: Pixar essentially right after it spun off from Lucasfilm years earlier,
Speaker 1: so it was a great case of synergy there now.
Speaker 1: According to lifewire, though to be clear, I didn't see
Speaker 1: their source for where they got the statistic, Apple sold
Speaker 1: one million videos within the first twenty days of iTunes
Speaker 1: supporting video sales, which is not a bad start. But
Speaker 1: this is also a good time to note that people
Speaker 1: were starting to already notice some serious feature creep in iTunes,
Speaker 1: something that would become a real issue as the software
Speaker 1: would grow over the years. Eat your creep is when
Speaker 1: product developers keep adding features to something beyond its original
Speaker 1: intended purpose. In some cases, it might all work out,
Speaker 1: like with the famous Swiss Army knife. You know you've
Speaker 1: got a toothpick in there. Who thought that a knife
Speaker 1: would need a toothpick? But it works for Swiss Army knife.
Speaker 1: But in other cases you'll end up with a product
Speaker 1: that's a total nightmare. It might quote unquote do a
Speaker 1: hundred things, and maybe it doesn't do any of them
Speaker 1: very well. That's the bad kind of feature creep. It's
Speaker 1: part of what sidelined Copeland, which if you listen to
Speaker 1: my last episode you'll recognize as the code name for
Speaker 1: a version of the Mac operating system that never came
Speaker 1: to be. With videos being added to iTunes, some people
Speaker 1: begin to ask if, perhaps at the very least, Apple
Speaker 1: should reconsider the name iTunes. After all, on iTunes you
Speaker 1: could get music, but you could also get videos, e
Speaker 1: books and podcasts. It seemed like either Apple should change
Speaker 1: the name of the software to better reflect everything that
Speaker 1: was available in it or break the program up into
Speaker 1: more manageable applications, something will chat about at the end
Speaker 1: of this episode, because that's ultimately what they have done.
Speaker 1: The relatively simple interface of the earlier versions of iTunes
Speaker 1: was beginning to get a little less simple. For some reason,
Speaker 1: the company decided against either rebranding or restructuring iTunes, and
Speaker 1: not for the last time either. Not entirely certain what
Speaker 1: the logic was behind maintaining the iTunes name, because there
Speaker 1: were other instances where Apple didn't seem particularly reluctant to
Speaker 1: rebrand the service after they had changed it significantly, So
Speaker 1: I don't know what was special about this one. Still
Speaker 1: beyond a few critics who felt that iTunes was starting
Speaker 1: to get a bit too bloated and messy, things were
Speaker 1: going really well, and it laid the groundwork for the next,
Speaker 1: really big revision to the platform. The seventh generation of
Speaker 1: the iTunes program would come out in September two thousand six,
Speaker 1: following in the footsteps of iTunes five, which would come
Speaker 1: out the previous September. From here on out, Apple would
Speaker 1: establish the fall as the time for announcements about things
Speaker 1: like the iPhone, the iPod, and iTunes, although the iPhone
Speaker 1: would have to wait for a couple more years it
Speaker 1: had not yet been unveiled. Now you could download movies
Speaker 1: using iTunes. Earlier it had all been music videos and
Speaker 1: TV show episodes, but with iTunes seven you could do
Speaker 1: movies as well. But that also added to the feature creep.
Speaker 1: Criticisms people had for the program, but it became a
Speaker 1: popular option. Now. I've got a lot more to say
Speaker 1: about iTunes, but before I get into it, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. One thing that iTunes seven would add
Speaker 1: to the experience was a user interface upgrade in the
Speaker 1: form of cover Flow. And this wasn't actually an Apple invention.
Speaker 1: Much like iTunes itself, it was something that they had
Speaker 1: seen from a different developer and and acquired it. It
Speaker 1: was the work of an artist named Andrew Coulter in Right,
Speaker 1: who came up with the idea of representing files in
Speaker 1: a visual way in which you could flip back and
Speaker 1: forth through them like a slide show. And Apple would
Speaker 1: acquire cover Flow and then implemented it in iTunes seven
Speaker 1: point oh, so that users could browse through their music
Speaker 1: collection by album cover, sort of as if they were
Speaker 1: standing at a shelf thumbing through all their record albums.
Speaker 1: So you can kind of get the visual appeal, although
Speaker 1: as I understand it, very few um iTunes users typically
Speaker 1: talked a lot about using it because it could be
Speaker 1: a little bit of a hassle. UM. I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's anecdotal, Like I don't know if Apple ever gathered
Speaker 1: any information about it, I do know that it wouldn't
Speaker 1: hold on to cover flow forever. And later on Apple
Speaker 1: would be involved in a patent infringement lawsuit against Mirror
Speaker 1: World Technologies and later the parent company for the Mirror
Speaker 1: World Technologies, which was Network One, and it was all
Speaker 1: about cover Flow. At the heart of the matter was
Speaker 1: a patent that described a system that organized documents in
Speaker 1: a stream chronologically similar to the way that cover flow worked,
Speaker 1: but the patent dated all the way back to so
Speaker 1: it definitely predated the iTunes version of cover flow. While
Speaker 1: the court case went back and forth in favor of
Speaker 1: either one party or the other as it was making
Speaker 1: its way through the court system, getting appealed and pushed
Speaker 1: to higher and higher courts, the two parties would eventually
Speaker 1: agree to a settlement that gave Apple a full license
Speaker 1: to use the technology, and eventually Apple would phase out
Speaker 1: to cover flow, because again, while it was really flashy,
Speaker 1: it was not necessarily the most practical user interface. Other
Speaker 1: features that joined the iTunes family with seven point oh
Speaker 1: included gapless playback. This is pretty much what the name suggests.
Speaker 1: It's playback of multiple tracks with no gaps between the songs. Now,
Speaker 1: that isn't that big a deal between songs that have
Speaker 1: clear endings and beginnings, but on some albums, one track
Speaker 1: is supposed to flow directly into the beginning of the
Speaker 1: next track, and again at between the two breaks up
Speaker 1: the listening experience. If you want an example of this,
Speaker 1: you should check out the songs this beat goes on
Speaker 1: and switching to Glide by the Kings, which is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite transitions between songs. But obviously there are
Speaker 1: tons of examples out there in music, particularly on concept albums,
Speaker 1: where a song will flow directly into the next one,
Speaker 1: So gapless helped out a lot that way. iTunes seven
Speaker 1: would remain the standard version for two years, with iTunes
Speaker 1: eight premiering in two thousand eight. So this was unusual
Speaker 1: because typically Apple was updating iTunes at least annually, if
Speaker 1: not more than once a year. Because iTunes five and
Speaker 1: six both appeared just within a month of each other,
Speaker 1: but between two thousand six and two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: when iTunes seven was the standard, Apple would have another
Speaker 1: big product announcement, which was, of course, the iPhone and
Speaker 1: Macworld two thousand seven, Steve Jobs got up on stage
Speaker 1: to introduce the iPhone, what he called a revolutionary product
Speaker 1: that changes everything, and that's exactly what the iPhone turned
Speaker 1: out to be. The sleek design, intuitive interface, and Apple's
Speaker 1: software blew away the admittedly biased crowd of Mac fans
Speaker 1: in the audience. It would be six months before the
Speaker 1: phone came to market, but Apple clearly already had a
Speaker 1: hit on its hands before even getting into the stores,
Speaker 1: and iTunes would play a big part with the iPhone,
Speaker 1: and the iPhone would play a large part of why
Speaker 1: iTunes is now going away in twenty At the event,
Speaker 1: Jobs explained that iPhone users would sink their phones with
Speaker 1: their computers through iTunes, just like they would with an iPod.
Speaker 1: He made the case that people were already used to
Speaker 1: this idea as the company was getting ready to sell
Speaker 1: it's one million iPod in two thousand seven. So from
Speaker 1: the start, iTunes and the iPhone were linked, both metaphorically
Speaker 1: and frequently physically. The original iPhone couldn't sync up with
Speaker 1: a user's account of the air. Users would have to
Speaker 1: place their phone in a docking station attached to their
Speaker 1: computer and the phone would sync up using iTunes, so
Speaker 1: you can make easy changes on your computer and then
Speaker 1: sink it to your phone, rather than having to go
Speaker 1: through your phone settings and change things that way. This
Speaker 1: added yet more features two iTunes technically inversion seven point three,
Speaker 1: that was the first version of iTunes to have iPhone support.
Speaker 1: Version seven point four would add support for another new
Speaker 1: Apple product, the iPod Touch, which, for those who might
Speaker 1: not be familiar, was sort of an iPhone without the
Speaker 1: phone part. The seventh generation of iTunes would go so
Speaker 1: far as to support the second generation of the iPhones
Speaker 1: operating system, which we now call iOS, with iTunes version
Speaker 1: seven point seven, so version seven lasted long enough to
Speaker 1: go through two different versions of the operating system for
Speaker 1: the iPhone. In two thousand and eight, Apple finally released
Speaker 1: a full new version of iTunes with iTunes eight, and
Speaker 1: in this update, the company included a feature called i
Speaker 1: Tunes Genius, which would generate a playlist based off a
Speaker 1: song the user selected. Genius would actually consult massive amounts
Speaker 1: of data in order to do this, And here's what
Speaker 1: was going on from a very high level. All right,
Speaker 1: Let's say you've got your music library there and you
Speaker 1: want to put together a playlist for a chill party
Speaker 1: of hipsters, but you don't really have the time to
Speaker 1: dive through your massive music library to curate the perfect playlist. Instead,
Speaker 1: you select one song to be the seed for this playlist,
Speaker 1: and let's say it's waiting for Superman by the Flaming
Speaker 1: Lips from your perspective. iTunes then pulls together a playlist
Speaker 1: of songs for you based on that selection, and it
Speaker 1: only takes an instant it's there almost immediately. But what's
Speaker 1: actually going on is a bit more complicated. Apple would
Speaker 1: take your data, including the information about all your songs
Speaker 1: in your library, the genre those songs would belong to,
Speaker 1: and how frequently you listen to each of those songs,
Speaker 1: and then would compare your data against the information of
Speaker 1: other iTunes genius users, and it would look for profiles
Speaker 1: that had a similar library to yours and the sort
Speaker 1: of things that they would tend to like. The Apple
Speaker 1: hasn't really revealed how it was weighing different variables, how
Speaker 1: it would assign weight to those variables, like how prevalent
Speaker 1: at particular genre is in any given library. How much
Speaker 1: does that matter? If my music library is eighty percent
Speaker 1: country music, then how much importance does the Genius algorithm
Speaker 1: give to the country genre? Uh? Or how does listening
Speaker 1: frequency affected? If I've listened to one particular song, let's
Speaker 1: say Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash, and I've listened
Speaker 1: to it five times as many times as the next
Speaker 1: closest song, then how much does that determine whether or
Speaker 1: not it shows up on a playlist? Those things were secrets,
Speaker 1: but it did use comparisons to draw conclusions about which
Speaker 1: songs would best match up to create a playlist of
Speaker 1: your choice. And it could also suggest songs in the
Speaker 1: iTunes music store that seemed to fit your preferences, but
Speaker 1: that weren't already in your library. So maybe it looks
Speaker 1: at your playlist and it says, oh, well, based on this,
Speaker 1: you should definitely have this other song, but you don't
Speaker 1: actually own this one yet. Here's a link if you
Speaker 1: would like to buy it, and you can listen to
Speaker 1: a preview and decide whether or not you want to
Speaker 1: add it to your library. In a way it's a
Speaker 1: little similar to what services like Pandora Radio we're already
Speaker 1: doing since two thousand five. Pandora Radio's method was to
Speaker 1: take songs and then break them down by describing them
Speaker 1: in as many different ways as possible. You take a
Speaker 1: piece of music and you say, all right, what are
Speaker 1: the different qualities of this music? So you might have
Speaker 1: ways of describing it saying there's a female vocalist, it
Speaker 1: has a complicated rhyme scheme, it's guitar driven, it's got
Speaker 1: a fast tempo, and so on. Then the radio algorithm
Speaker 1: would search for other songs in this database there were
Speaker 1: somewhat similar to the seed song you had selected, and
Speaker 1: then it would feed those extra songs to the user,
Speaker 1: And that gave opportunity for users to discover new music
Speaker 1: that fit their tastes. Maybe they'd hear a song that
Speaker 1: they've never heard before, but they'll love it because it
Speaker 1: happens to fall into the same sort of stuff that
Speaker 1: they already listened to. So Apple wasn't necessarily innovating in
Speaker 1: this space, but rather incorporating a working strategy into the
Speaker 1: existing iTunes framework, which is something the company is particularly
Speaker 1: strong at at identifying things that work well and then
Speaker 1: improving upon them. In addition to the Genius feature, iTunes
Speaker 1: eight also made available TV shows in HD format in
Speaker 1: the iTunes store, and the store continued to contribute a
Speaker 1: significant percentage of Apple's overall revenue, and it wasn't just
Speaker 1: affecting Apple. The company announced in April two eight that
Speaker 1: customers had purchased more than four billion songs from the
Speaker 1: ituned music store since its launch, making Apple the largest
Speaker 1: music retailer, beating out Walmart at least according to Apple's
Speaker 1: own press release. Other reports would state that Apple held
Speaker 1: a strong second place behind Walmart. So your mileage may
Speaker 1: vary on that particular point. It would eventually replace Walmart
Speaker 1: one way or the other. Question is just as when
Speaker 1: did that really happen and the pace was picking up.
Speaker 1: It was four billion songs when the company made this
Speaker 1: announcement in April of that year, but then in June,
Speaker 1: just a few months later, the company reported that the
Speaker 1: number of songs sold now topped more than five billion,
Speaker 1: which is incredible that it's it's an amazing achievement to
Speaker 1: have gone from four to five billion in just a
Speaker 1: couple of months. The closest competitor online with Apple in
Speaker 1: the music department at that time was Amazon, which had
Speaker 1: only been selling digital music downloads for about nine months.
Speaker 1: When Apple hit that five billion songs sold milestone, Amazon
Speaker 1: sales were about a tenth of Apples, But it is
Speaker 1: fair to point out that Apple had been in the
Speaker 1: business for five years at that point and Amazon had
Speaker 1: just gotten started. Business was going really well. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was enough to get discussions going in various state
Speaker 1: governments in the US about the prospect of taxing iTunes
Speaker 1: digital downloads. The concept faced a lot of opposition, particularly
Speaker 1: in California, not by not by coincidence that happens to
Speaker 1: be where Apple has its headquarters. But gradually many states
Speaker 1: would pass legislation allowing them to collect taxes on digital purchases.
Speaker 1: Not all of them would cover iTunes store purchases. It's
Speaker 1: a state by state sort of thing, but New Jersey
Speaker 1: would be the first to do so. Actually, the Garden
Speaker 1: State technically had done it in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: before any of this other stuff was happening. Version nine
Speaker 1: of iTunes would come out in September two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: Once again, Apple introduced new features with their increasingly gargantuan
Speaker 1: digital jukebox program. One of those was the iTunes LP feature.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like the bonus features on a DVD.
Speaker 1: For some albums, you could get lots of bonus stuff
Speaker 1: like music videos, live concert footage, liner notes, artists, interviews,
Speaker 1: and more. So it was kind of like getting a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of collectors editions stuff with your album purchase.
Speaker 1: For certain albums, not all of them had this. Similarly,
Speaker 1: Apple introduced iTunes Extras, which had bonus features for some
Speaker 1: films available on iTunes, so you could get deleted scenes
Speaker 1: and interviews and stuff like that when you downloaded your
Speaker 1: digital copy of let's say Batman Begins. That was one
Speaker 1: of the first movies to feature these extra things, and
Speaker 1: you would just you buy it from the iTunes store
Speaker 1: and along with the film, you would get access to
Speaker 1: this extra material. Another new feature was home sharing, which
Speaker 1: would allow iTunes users to share their libraries on up
Speaker 1: to five computers within a household. Each person in the
Speaker 1: household with an iTunes library could do the same with
Speaker 1: the others, so the shared library could grow much more quickly,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure it was a popular feature for folks
Speaker 1: who are living with housemates. Apple discontinued home sharing. Starting
Speaker 1: with iTunes version twelve point two, Apple also added in
Speaker 1: app management and sinking features and iTunes nine to let
Speaker 1: users arrange their app layouts, which then could transfer over
Speaker 1: to their iPhone upon sinking with the computer. One thing
Speaker 1: that Apple would take out of the music on the
Speaker 1: iTunes Store starting with iTunes nine was DRM, or Digital
Speaker 1: Rights Management. Apple had already negotiated with music label E
Speaker 1: m I to remove DRM from that labels music on
Speaker 1: the store a couple of years earlier, but everyone else
Speaker 1: still had DRM attached. In two thousand nine, the company
Speaker 1: was able to remove it from all the music in
Speaker 1: its store, and Steve Jobs had been an outspoken critic
Speaker 1: of DRM, but it took some time for Apple to
Speaker 1: actually ditch it. Amazon had already been selling digital music
Speaker 1: DRM free for some time. That to be fair, Amazon's
Speaker 1: foul format was MP three, while Apple was using A
Speaker 1: A C files that were at least marketed as being
Speaker 1: higher in quality. So you were balancing things out. Did
Speaker 1: you want higher quality music but with DRM, or did
Speaker 1: you want the lower quality arguably recordings but without DRM.
Speaker 1: Now as a concession of music labels, Apple also agreed
Speaker 1: to introducing variable pricing on music tracks, because before all
Speaker 1: songs cost nine cents. It didn't matter if the song
Speaker 1: was three minutes long or twelve minutes long, it was
Speaker 1: all ninety nine cents. But this agreement would allow labels
Speaker 1: to select a price of either sixty nine cents, ninety
Speaker 1: nine cents or a dollar twenty nine per song. And
Speaker 1: if you wanted to upgrade your library with DRM free music,
Speaker 1: you had to pay for it. In fact, it was
Speaker 1: thirty cents a song or sixty cents for an album,
Speaker 1: and I imagine that would get pretty expensive if you
Speaker 1: had a really big music library. Later, this would be
Speaker 1: replaced by a service called itune Match, which i'll talk
Speaker 1: about a little later in this podcast. First, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go and drink a nice big cup of tea, and
Speaker 1: we'll be right back after this break. All right, we're
Speaker 1: in the home stretch. So iTunes had been criticized for
Speaker 1: a long time for the fact that it was getting
Speaker 1: too big and unwieldy to be useful, particularly for Windows users.
Speaker 1: Now I've used iTunes on both Windows and Mac machines,
Speaker 1: and anecdotally, which I realized is not really evidence, I
Speaker 1: can tell you that in my experience. Using it on
Speaker 1: a Mac, while not perfect, was way easier than using
Speaker 1: it on Windows, and anyone who has had iTunes installed
Speaker 1: knows how it can place a really big demand on
Speaker 1: computer resources. But things were about to get even more
Speaker 1: messy with iTunes ten, the last version to release during
Speaker 1: Steve jobs lifetime he would pass away in the flagship
Speaker 1: app from Apple got a bit of a makeover until
Speaker 1: version ten. The logo for iTunes was a c D
Speaker 1: with a pair of eighth notes on it. After all,
Speaker 1: back when the first version of iTunes came out, that's
Speaker 1: the narrative Apple relied upon. The idea was that users
Speaker 1: would rip music from their store bought c d s
Speaker 1: and create a digital jukebox on their Mac computers. But
Speaker 1: the CD was a bit of an outdated symbol by
Speaker 1: this point, and the updated logo was a simple pair
Speaker 1: of musical eighth notes on a circular blue background. There
Speaker 1: was no more c D in the background. But the
Speaker 1: feature that got a lot of attention, and most of
Speaker 1: it was not really positive, was the addition of a
Speaker 1: new social networking element in the iTunes program called Ping.
Speaker 1: The purpose of Ping was to make it easier for
Speaker 1: users to share with one another. You could share information
Speaker 1: about your favorite artists, your favorite albums, You could share
Speaker 1: your thoughts about live shows you had attended. You could
Speaker 1: also view concert listings in your area, and you could
Speaker 1: indicate which shows you hoped to go see. The idea
Speaker 1: was to extend iTunes out to be a more social
Speaker 1: experience of my users. That people like to talk about
Speaker 1: their music collections and find out what their friends are
Speaker 1: listening to and find out what they're artists that they
Speaker 1: love what they're listening to, And in fact, you could
Speaker 1: do that with ping. At least in theory, you could
Speaker 1: follow artists, and the artists were encouraged to post to
Speaker 1: the social platform and share information about their experiences and
Speaker 1: what sort of music they enjoyed. So in theory it
Speaker 1: was all a pretty decent idea. Apple would encourage discover ability,
Speaker 1: it would bring more value to the experience of using iTunes,
Speaker 1: and ultimately it would help sell more tracks to users
Speaker 1: because you would encounter new music, or you'd find out
Speaker 1: that your favorite artist happens to be a big fan
Speaker 1: of this obscure artist and you think, well, that's got
Speaker 1: to be interesting, and you go out and you buy
Speaker 1: out all of their stuff. There was one big problem.
Speaker 1: Nobody was using Ping, at least, not enough people to
Speaker 1: justify continuing the service. So why did Ping fail? One
Speaker 1: big reason might have to do with another social platform,
Speaker 1: everybody's favorite monopoly, Facebook. The rumor was that Apple had
Speaker 1: originally included Facebook interoperability in Paying. Users would be able
Speaker 1: to share their paying activity directly to their Facebook pages,
Speaker 1: and that made sense because everybody was already over at Facebook.
Speaker 1: That's where all your friends already were, so this would
Speaker 1: help attract people who weren't using paying, but who were
Speaker 1: on Facebook, and then they would see this service and
Speaker 1: the notifications and think, oh, I should check that out.
Speaker 1: But before Paying could even launch, something changed, and the
Speaker 1: story I've heard most frequently is that Facebook pulled support
Speaker 1: from the app, that this was a decision on Facebook's point,
Speaker 1: not on Apples, and that it was possibly in an
Speaker 1: effort to avoid helping give a boost up to a
Speaker 1: potential competitor, so you could argue it was an anti
Speaker 1: competitive move. Ping failed to gain any real traction and
Speaker 1: didn't survive to make it to iTunes eleven, which launched
Speaker 1: in two thousand twelve. So was it a terror experience? Well,
Speaker 1: I can't say from a personal perspective, as I actually
Speaker 1: never used it. I never really heard anyone bash it,
Speaker 1: But at the same time, I never heard anyone say
Speaker 1: anything positive about it either. It just sort of was
Speaker 1: and then it really wasn't. In addition to paying, iTunes
Speaker 1: ten would introduce Airplay. That's the updated version of the
Speaker 1: earlier feature called air tunes that I mentioned. With air Tunes,
Speaker 1: users could stream music from their iTunes PC to another
Speaker 1: WiFi connected device on their network. Airplay would work very
Speaker 1: much the same way, except it would eventually include video media.
Speaker 1: Apple also had more products that were compatible with Airplay
Speaker 1: at this point, so they were able to sell those
Speaker 1: as well. The third thing that iTunes tend introduced, though
Speaker 1: it would only be fully implemented in iTunes eleven, was
Speaker 1: iTunes Match. I also mentioned this earlier. So this service
Speaker 1: was to address the fact that we were shifting away
Speaker 1: from having a centralized personal comput uter as the hub
Speaker 1: for all our entertainment. You know, back when iTunes launched
Speaker 1: in two thousand one, that was how things worked. You
Speaker 1: would have your Mac computer, you probably have just the
Speaker 1: one Mac computer, and you would have it act as
Speaker 1: the home for all your digital media and in those
Speaker 1: early days that was pretty much just music or maybe
Speaker 1: audio books as well. If you wanted to burn a
Speaker 1: CD or load songs onto an MP three player, you
Speaker 1: would do it by using that machine. You would burn CDs,
Speaker 1: and that machines CD burner. You would connect your MP
Speaker 1: V player to that machine. Everything was centralized to that
Speaker 1: one gadget. But by two thousand eleven things were different.
Speaker 1: Now with cloud services and cloud storage, we could have
Speaker 1: all our stuff living on computers that are out on
Speaker 1: the internet somewhere. Sure, it wasn't sitting on our computer
Speaker 1: at home unless we chose to download everything. But the
Speaker 1: flip side was that if we were using any device
Speaker 1: to access our cloud account, we'd get access to all
Speaker 1: of that content. So if I got a brand new phone,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have to sink it with my home computer
Speaker 1: and slowly poured over my entire music collection or go
Speaker 1: through and figure out which songs I wanted and which
Speaker 1: ones I didn't. I could just access my library of
Speaker 1: music in the cloud anyway. iTunes Match is a sort
Speaker 1: of a solution to a practical problem. See if you
Speaker 1: had purchased your music straight from the iTunes music store,
Speaker 1: Apple knew about it and those songs would automatically be
Speaker 1: in your cloud library because Apple had a record of
Speaker 1: you buying them. But what if you had ripped songs
Speaker 1: from a CD and then you had them in your
Speaker 1: library that way, or what if you had downloaded from
Speaker 1: some other source like band camp or something, And what
Speaker 1: if and I know this is scandalous, but what if
Speaker 1: you had pirated music? Well, iTunes Match would scan all
Speaker 1: the music in your iTunes library and it would look
Speaker 1: for matches in the Apple database. When it found matches,
Speaker 1: it would be the matched version that would join your
Speaker 1: cloud library. Not only that, the version of the matched
Speaker 1: songs in the cloud would be encoded to a high
Speaker 1: quality two six killabits per second a a C file,
Speaker 1: and they would be DRM free. So let's say you
Speaker 1: had bought a song in the early days of the
Speaker 1: iTunes music store. It would have been encoded at a
Speaker 1: killabits per second, so lower bit rate, and it would
Speaker 1: have also had DRM on it. Your cloud version would
Speaker 1: be higher quality and DRM free, so you could end
Speaker 1: up with songs that actually sounded better than the ones
Speaker 1: that were on your physical hard drive when you enabled
Speaker 1: iTunes match. For those songs that were in your library,
Speaker 1: but we're not in the Apple database. In other words,
Speaker 1: Apple did not have the rights to that music. They
Speaker 1: scan their database to say, well, you know, we don't
Speaker 1: offer this track. You got it some other way. It
Speaker 1: would then upload those songs, and only those songs from
Speaker 1: your computer to your cloud library. That would help guarantee
Speaker 1: that users would have access to their full library of music,
Speaker 1: but also cut down on data transfer requirements to make
Speaker 1: it happen. You don't have to upload everything, just the
Speaker 1: songs that Apple doesn't already have. The services subscription based,
Speaker 1: and it launched at about twenty five dollars per year.
Speaker 1: If your subscription were two lapse, you would lose access
Speaker 1: to those songs, though they would still be on whatever
Speaker 1: hard drive they were stored on, and Apple would allow
Speaker 1: users to download their cloud library to a Mac or PC,
Speaker 1: so you could create a backup first before allowing your
Speaker 1: subscription to LIMP to end, and you would end up
Speaker 1: with the higher quality versions of your songs, at least
Speaker 1: for the ones that Apple actually had copies of. Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs gave that presentation about iTunes Match, but not long
Speaker 1: after that he would pass away, and his passing was
Speaker 1: felt by the entire industry. Not just at Apple, and
Speaker 1: many people were wondering how the company would carry on
Speaker 1: without the iconic leader at the home. One thing that
Speaker 1: shook up the company in two thousand eleven, besides the
Speaker 1: death of their founder, was a report from the Telegraph
Speaker 1: that a security vulnerability in iTunes had given a British
Speaker 1: bunny the opportunity to create software that exploited that vulnerability.
Speaker 1: The company called Gamma International created what appeared to be
Speaker 1: a software update to iTunes, like a security update, but
Speaker 1: in fact it was essentially malware that would hack the
Speaker 1: person's iTunes account. The Telegraph reported that Apple had been
Speaker 1: aware of this vulnerability since two thousand and eight, but
Speaker 1: had failed to patch it until two thousand eleven, so
Speaker 1: that wasn't great news. In two thousand twelve, Apple introduced
Speaker 1: iTunes eleven. Boy did this stir up a hornet's nest.
Speaker 1: They paired that announcement with announcements about the iPhone five
Speaker 1: and the iOS version six that came out that same year.
Speaker 1: But this version of iTunes featured a brand new interface,
Speaker 1: overhauling the way iTunes had looked for ages. It also
Speaker 1: got rid of a navigation bar that had been part
Speaker 1: of iTunes for years, which frustrated a lot of users.
Speaker 1: People really didn't like the way this change may it
Speaker 1: more difficult for them to navigate through their collections and
Speaker 1: to go from things like music to TV two podcasts.
Speaker 1: The program now allowed for a sink listening or viewing experience,
Speaker 1: which meant that you could listen to an album or
Speaker 1: watch a show on one iTunes connected device, You could
Speaker 1: pause it, you could go to a different device connected
Speaker 1: to that same iTunes account, and you could pick up
Speaker 1: right where you left off. So if you were listening
Speaker 1: on your phone when you were walking home and you
Speaker 1: walk through the door, you switch it over so that
Speaker 1: your computer is using airplay to play it through your
Speaker 1: WiFi connected speakers. It picks up right where you left
Speaker 1: off when you're listening on your phone. Uh. This version
Speaker 1: of iTunes was also the official end to ping. Ping
Speaker 1: was done, and it only lasted a little less than
Speaker 1: two years. Really, UM and Apple kind of abandoned it,
Speaker 1: and it also had iCloud integration built into it. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen, the company would release the last
Speaker 1: major update to iTunes iTunes twelve, and this one got
Speaker 1: pretty harsh criticism as well. When it came out once again.
Speaker 1: Apple made big changes to the user interface. Uh, they
Speaker 1: did not go back to the old user interface. They
Speaker 1: changed it more. They removed the sidebar again. If you
Speaker 1: had put it in with iTunes eleven, it was gone again,
Speaker 1: making it pretty difficult to add back in. You could
Speaker 1: do it manually, but it usually it would require you
Speaker 1: to do a quick search on the internet to figure
Speaker 1: out the steps you needed to follow. The playback bar
Speaker 1: has changed as well. In general, a lot of users
Speaker 1: looked at the changes and said that the control and
Speaker 1: menu system was actually less intuitive and useful as a result.
Speaker 1: Not everyone hated the changes, but the people who did
Speaker 1: hate them really hated them, and they wrote long, detailed
Speaker 1: posts on the Internet about why the changes were possibly
Speaker 1: the worst thing ever. And I exaggerate a little bit
Speaker 1: with that, but I did come across one article that
Speaker 1: legit stated categorically that iTunes twelve was the worst soft
Speaker 1: Apple ever released and that it should be recalled. And
Speaker 1: I came across more than a couple that gave instructions
Speaker 1: on how users could roll back their version of iTunes
Speaker 1: to an earlier version. So that's never good to read
Speaker 1: if you're releasing software. Oh and this is also when
Speaker 1: Apple gifted every iTunes user with a copy of the
Speaker 1: YouTube album Song of Innocence, whether they wanted a copy
Speaker 1: of it or not. Lots of people complained that the
Speaker 1: album was taking a valuable storage space on their devices,
Speaker 1: particularly on iPhones, and also that it wasn't actually easy
Speaker 1: to get rid of the album. That eventually prompted Bono
Speaker 1: from You two to actually apologize publicly for the whole
Speaker 1: goof them up, and Apple would eventually let users delete
Speaker 1: the album more easily. An update to iTunes twelve integrated
Speaker 1: support with Apple Music, that is, Apple's music streaming subscription service.
Speaker 1: So here we get to the point where Apple is
Speaker 1: doing the thing that Steve Jobs said no one wanted
Speaker 1: to do more than a decade earlier, though obviously things
Speaker 1: that changed significantly within those intervening years. So for ten
Speaker 1: dollars a month, you could sign up and listen to
Speaker 1: music streaming on demand from Apple's entire database, and you
Speaker 1: could also listen to music that had been curated for
Speaker 1: you based upon your tastes as defined by your own
Speaker 1: personal music library in the cloud. And that is how
Speaker 1: it works today. So from two thousand fourteen to two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen. iTunes twelve would continue to grow and add
Speaker 1: more support for features like Apple Music, but the behemoth
Speaker 1: was really out of control. It was impossible to deny
Speaker 1: that the software had grown too large, and that trying
Speaker 1: to keep the same aesthetic across multiple windows owned and
Speaker 1: operated by different teams with an Apple seemed like a
Speaker 1: fool's Errand in addition, the consumer trend of moving towards
Speaker 1: streaming services instead of purchasing copies of media meant the
Speaker 1: the iTunes store was starting to flag a bit. The
Speaker 1: sales were starting to drop off, so the writing was
Speaker 1: on the wall. Digital downloads are starting to follow the
Speaker 1: same trend as CDs and DVDs, so it made more
Speaker 1: sense for Apple to discontinue iTunes and focus on breaking
Speaker 1: up those services into three dedicated apps, which is what
Speaker 1: we're getting now. The successors to iTunes are the apps
Speaker 1: Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts, very similar to
Speaker 1: what is already on iOS devices. The company has assured
Speaker 1: customers that their music libraries will remain intact during this transition.
Speaker 1: All music purchased or transferred to iTunes will be in
Speaker 1: the Apple Music app, including playlists, so none of that
Speaker 1: is going away. Movies and TV shows will similarly be
Speaker 1: available on the Apple TV app. The podcast you subscribe
Speaker 1: to will be on surprise surprise, the Apple Podcast app,
Speaker 1: and Audio books will actually move over to the Apple
Speaker 1: Books apps, so everything is getting split up. To interface
Speaker 1: between a computer and iOS device like the iPhone or
Speaker 1: iPad will now require you to use the Mac Finder
Speaker 1: to do that, so you wouldn't use iTunes anymore. Mac
Speaker 1: Finder is now the the overlaying application you use to
Speaker 1: synchronize between a device and a computer. The next version
Speaker 1: of Mac os Catalina will have no support for iTunes,
Speaker 1: so this is Apple getting users prepared for a big
Speaker 1: change now. Personally, I think this is the right move,
Speaker 1: though it's got the potential to be really confusing for
Speaker 1: existing iTunes customers who use Mac computers. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of questions being asked, and to Apple's credit, the
Speaker 1: company is answering them over time, but I think it's
Speaker 1: hard to defend a piece of software the group so
Speaker 1: far beyond its original purpose. As for iTunes on Windows,
Speaker 1: there are no specific plans from the company as of
Speaker 1: the recording of this podcast to discontinue it I don't
Speaker 1: know if they'll continue to support it, but there are
Speaker 1: no plans on it going away. Also, the store element
Speaker 1: will still be there in the individual apps. You'll still
Speaker 1: be able to shop for stuff and download stuff if
Speaker 1: you want to. Although a lot more people are now
Speaker 1: just streaming things and not bothering to buy them at all.
Speaker 1: I know that's how I am. I haven't. I can't
Speaker 1: remember the last album I bought. It might have been
Speaker 1: the soundtrack to Hades Town. I did buy that one
Speaker 1: because it was so incredible, but beyond that, I mean
Speaker 1: that was like a one off, special thing. I usually
Speaker 1: end up streaming stuff because that's just convenient, and I'm
Speaker 1: almost always somewhere where there's an Internet connection. The only
Speaker 1: times when I regret going that route or when I'm
Speaker 1: on an airplane and I can't connect to WiFi and
Speaker 1: then I regret not having downloaded more stuff to my devices.
Speaker 1: But that's that's a rare case. Otherwise, I'm just streaming
Speaker 1: everything just like everybody else. So Apple was making a
Speaker 1: move that makes a lot of sense. You can't really
Speaker 1: fault the company for doing it. It is weird to
Speaker 1: see a an app that has been around for half
Speaker 1: my life now going away, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: I'm not feeling particularly sad about it. iTunes and I
Speaker 1: have always had a love hate relationship. I loved being
Speaker 1: able to synchronize between a device and a computer and
Speaker 1: get all that stuff on an m P three player.
Speaker 1: I hated just about everything else with iTunes. I loved
Speaker 1: getting my show featured on iTunes. That was always wonderful.
Speaker 1: It was very flattering, and it definitely helped bring listeners
Speaker 1: to the show. For that, I'm always thankful. But when
Speaker 1: I used it was using iTunes, I never felt like
Speaker 1: it was the easiest to navigate around, particularly from version
Speaker 1: to version where things would change so dramatically where you
Speaker 1: have to relearn where everything is in order to get
Speaker 1: stuff done. Um, it's interesting that the same company that
Speaker 1: can make such an intuitive user interface with the iOS
Speaker 1: devices also made a desktop application that got progressively more
Speaker 1: difficult to use, at least for me. Then again, I'm
Speaker 1: also old, so new things confuse me more and more
Speaker 1: every year. All right, Well, that wraps up this set
Speaker 1: of episodes about iTunes. I plan on doing an update
Speaker 1: about how stuff works in the next episode because I
Speaker 1: got a listener request for it. And uh, it's been
Speaker 1: a couple of years since I talked about how Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: and you guys might be curious to know what's been
Speaker 1: going on and how things have changed. You know, I
Speaker 1: say that I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: in my Heart Radio, But what does that actually mean. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll explain all that. I'll explain what the company is
Speaker 1: doing now in the next episode. Hopefully you'll you'll find
Speaker 1: that interesting because you know, these are people who are
Speaker 1: near and dear to my heart. Some of them are
Speaker 1: co workers and some of them are former co workers.
Speaker 1: But I'll explain more in that next episode. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for future episodes, you can send me an
Speaker 1: email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: You can drop on by our website that's tech stuff
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of
Speaker 1: our past shows. There. You also find links to the
Speaker 1: social media presence for the show, as well as a
Speaker 1: link to our online store, where every purchasing make goes
Speaker 1: to help our show and we greatly appreciate it, and
Speaker 1: I will talk to you again really soon. Ye hext
Speaker 1: Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.