iTunes is a terrible music player. Is there a decent one?

There, I said it. I've felt this way for a long time, but I feel like I have to say it again. iTunes sucks. The interface isn't intuitive, cover flow is an unnavigable and unimaginative joke, the program won't crawl through your various media folders to find what you have on your system, the fact that you have to make a playlist to burn a disc is ludicrous and the Genius feature is anything but. How much of a genius can it be if it keeps shuffling around the same 25 songs when I want it to pick new songs. I can make much better playlists by myself, which defeats the purpose of this feature to begin with.

Let me say at this point that I've been an Apple guy for the better part of twenty years now. My first computer was an Apple and I have always preferred them, but I have never liked the iPod (at least not the early versions of the OS) and iTunes has not taken the leap forward that iOS has in its recent incarnations. The UI is still clunky and boring and doesn't capitalize on the latest in software possibilities for interactive and interesting interfaces.

And Ping? Please. That's a half-assed attempt to do something Facebook like in Apple's closed little playground and, well, we have Facebook, so who cares. Go away, Ping. You bother me.

And none of this has even touched on the Apple Store, which I don't even want to get started on. I can't understand why people buy anything from this store. They were the first to market? How long does that have to last? I've long contended that subscription-based music is the only way forward for the music industry. Recorded music is no longer a product in the way it was ten years ago. The best way for the industry to survive is to allow unfettered access to as much music as possible and divide the royalties in the same way ASCAP, BMI, et al have done for years for radio airplay, etc. As a musician myself, this is what I want to see. I want people to be able to get ahold of my music and listen to it without having to make a commerce decision. But Apple's store perpetuates the old model of ownership. And it's the way it works now.

So, now you're asking where one might find the forward thinking software and business model that I speak of? Napster? Ugh. I tried Napster's new iteration and the streaming quality was terrible. If you want to download a sing at higher quality and listen at home, you have to, you guessed it, buy the MP3. You can download up to 100 songs onto a mobile device, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

Rhapsody? Pandora? I haven't tried Rhapsody, but I get the sense it's very similar to Napster. Pandora is cool, if you want to listen to the radio, but you can't listen to a record..

Emusic? I was an Emusic subscriber until about a month ago when they went from a subscription-based point system to, you guessed it, a money-based system. Sure, the pricing structure was about the same, but I get the sense that Emusic sold themselves out to get the big Universal catalog they'd been coveting. I can feel the slippery slope from here.

So where does that leave us? What service offers an unlimited subscription-based music consumption model with a really slick desktop client that finds all the music on your computer and network as well making suggestions from the marketplace to go along with what you have in your collection and then plays them all together when you use the genius-like smart dj feature?

Wait for it....

Zune

That's right, for my money, Zune is the best music player and online marketplace out there by far. For $14.95 a month you have unlimited access to everything on the Zune Marketplace--that's decent quality downloads, not streaming--plus a desktop client that really looks beautiful, integrates artist pictures as the music plays, has multiple themes to choose from, offers a dashboard quickplay screen where you can pin your favorite stuff, find the new stuff you've added, or look at your history.

In every way, the Zune model is exactly what iTunes should be but isn't.

So why isn't the Zune wildly popular? The players are pretty slick, and I've already told you how much I like the market and software. One word: Microsoft.

The folks in Redmond, Washington have a burr under their saddles and have had for a long time. They're the smart, awkward sibling in this technology family. And they can't seem past their own anger and frustration. Instead of realizing they have a great model here and selling that model to any and all takers, forsaking the hardware for market penetration across platforms, they force you to buy their Zune player to take the music out of the house. And in this day and age, who wants to carry around another device when smart phones are perfect for music listening and apps give you the opportunity to listen in multiple ways. No, Microsoft wont even write a Mac version of the software, stubbornly continuing the hardware wars that they were winning ten years ago, but have become completely irrelevant in recent years.

Pull your head out of your backsides, Microsoft and sell the service, port the software, and let people experience what a great product you have, especially compared to the savants at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA.

We have 5 iPods (1st gen Nano, Shuffle, iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, iPhone 4) in this house, three Zunes (one lost, one broken and one pink). If I could download the Zune app on my phone tomorrow I'd re-up for the subscription service right now and download until I couldn't download any more. I'd try new music that I wouldn't buy. I'd consume like a bear getting ready to hibernate. But as it stands, I have to limp by dissatisfied and frustrated because one company is the victim of its own arrogance and another is a victim of its own blinding pride and vanity.

And who loses out? We do.