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I am an iTunes dork.

I have well over 15,000 songs in my iTunes library, and I have rated every single one via iTunes’ one-to-five-star system. I have meticulously tagged every song in my collection according to genre and other data points.

I go song by song deciding what, for example, is funk, alternative, R&B, or avant garde — according to my own criteria. I differentiate between jazz and jazz with vocals. I invent genres that make sense only to me: swingy, modern, classique, atmospheric. I distinguish between rock and “moderate rock” according to my own taste. I use the term “lo fi” to signal something that has nothing to do with how rock critics use the phrase.

And I chuckle at artists who labeled their music “Unclassifiable.” Oh, really? Watch this!

More than a decade ago, iTunes turned one of my passionate hobbies (listening to music) into something that looks an awful lot like work.

And I love it.

I love it even though more and more of us are switching from downloading to streaming, embracing services from Pandora to Spotify to SoundCloud. While we still spend more on music downloads, the latest figures from the Recording Industry Association of America reinforce the trend — streaming revenue is up 28 percent over the past six months, while download revenue has fallen 12 percent.

I love it even though I’ve drifted toward the streaming stream myself, without ever giving it much thought. After all, there are plenty of free (ad-supported), easy-to-use services with impressive music catalogs. And over the years, iTunes has become an increasingly bloated and irritating piece of software, overloaded with features nobody asked for.

Despite all of this, I remain an iTunes dork. And I am not ashamed of my iTunes dorkhood.

I repeat: I am an iTunes dork. And I love it.

Changing the tunes

If the shift toward streaming music — instead of owning it — continues, it will be the third such transition I’ve endured.

As a young music fan, I resisted the move from vinyl to compact disc largely for economic reasons: Pricier CDs severely tested my budget and didn’t sound that much better to my ears.

Of course I eventually capitulated. And when the digital download arrived on the scene, I was all in. Hopefully I won’t get in trouble for admitting now that I was a happy user of the original Napster, and a LimeWire enthusiast after that. More to the point, I was thrilled when, in 2003, Apple introduced iTunes, which was profoundly superior to other desktop digital music players of that era, the names of which I can’t even remember.

There were a bunch of reasons for this, but here’s the biggie, in one word and image: metadata.

View photos iTunes screenshot More

When iTunes first appeared, I scrolled through my library, inventing genres, applying tags. When I realized the Comments field could be used to tag songs that fit more than one genre, and that the Grouping field offered still further possibilities … well, many hours were lost.

For a certain kind of tech enthusiast — a dorky one — figuring out endless ways to build and tweak custom lists is another delightful time suck. Using those extra fields, I could add relevant metadata that had nothing to do with genre — adding an “@” to the Comments field of songs with offensive language, or “New Orleans” to the Grouping field of songs I associated with the city.

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