Speak for yourself. iTunes user interface was so much easier on the computer to use than the current mess that is the Music app on the computer. I'd love to get the old iTunes app back.
Now, people got why they wished for: iTunes split into a million pieces, with every piece crappified in the process. Just yesterday Music automagically fetched some wrong album art for a track I added, and after adding the correct image, I couldn’t delete that wrong one for two minutes, until I suddenly could (I just kept pressing delete, god knows what was going on). Ugh.
The problem was more that it was also managing files on your office, doing firmware updates and a whole load of unrelated crap.
And it still does all this on windows.. :/
They also do multi device so much better. It take feels "Apple". If I'm playing music on my phone I can actually change the song on a third party client on my FreeBSD desktop which isn't supported by Spotify at all.
Spotify really does a lot of those things "you just can't do" and they aren't even big friends with the music industry (though I guess despite their initial battles they are now)
I think Apple Music turns 15 years old this year (released in iOS 1)...it hasn't come that far in all that time.
1. It has come a long way. iTunes really was a horrible piece of shit software for many years. It is much much much better now.
2. There isn't any viable alternatives. I don't care what people say, I've tried them all.
IMO there's two bigger issues that really prevent anyone from competing and improving the status quo:
a. You need to be friends with the music industry to be in this field, and to retain this friendship there's a lot of things you just can't do. Imagine if something like these flash widgets that you could embed in your website to stream your favorite playlists could still exist.
b. The Apple ecosystem is preventing a lot of people (I believe a majority of phones are iPhones in the US) from moving to competitors and improve competition.