so frustrating... iTunes the application used to be pretty great. And by used to be - I'm talking about 2001ish when it was a super fast, super responsive app that cataloged my music, ripped CDs, burned CDs, in such a low overhead way that it made me smile. Then they introduced the store which I hate and still refuse to use. And now this... ugh. Get back to making solid hardware, OS, and applications. Stop trying to be a music service. BLERGH.
Right. You liked the era when your music database was an .xml file that typically ran under 1k per album. Back before they started "extending" it. I have a computer pretty much dedicated to running iTunes, Plex and Transmission. Of those three, iTunes is definitely the heavyweight. Why? 25,000 songs, 210GB, 40MB XML file. Which is actually a stunning improvement - the XML file for iTunes 10 was over 250MB with virtually the same library. Here's the reality: Apple makes their money selling iPhones. 70% of revenue, 82% of profit come from iPhones. iPhones need streaming music. That's just the way the world is going. Far better to serve your songs from a central server than try and make that mac they wish you hadn't bought sync across a cloud service they've been studiously fucking up since 2005. And since they couldn't buy Spotify, they bought Beats because at least they recognized that they had exactly zero cloud competence and this way any foibles can be blamed on their recently acquired whipping boy. The other important thing to consider is all that music they sold you? They'll never make money off it ever again. It's all about new customers and you know what? The 18-24 year olds that are likely to buy into this never really torrented. Streaming is all they know. "matching" is not compelling for them. Apple doesn't want to tell you that they don't value you at all as a customer and, as far as they're concerned, you can twist in the wind. But that's the reality.