I've been a heavy user of iTunes for years, compiling a collection of over 30k songs and am pretty OCD in my organization of them. I go so far as to tag the producer and writers of songs of my favorite albums, and cannot stand to see a song without the album art on it.

But in my years of using it, I've been pretty much come to the conclusion that Apple doesn't give a shit about the bulk user like me, and also has absolutely no skill in creating a social integration within the app. Spotify is a step up in this dept., but honestly I think that app is ugly, clunky, and their social integration isn't even very fluid, although years better than iTunes.

I've been waiting for itunes, or some other company to basically come out with something that:

-Let's me custom create ID3 tags, or at least add some new ones (separate composer into different songwriting/producing credits, as well as adding the label/sub labels of the album (I mean seriously why hasn't this already been done).

-Let's me tag songs by "keywords", so that I can create better smart playlists, and group songs according to categories inside of genres without having to manage 100 different genres.

-Have some sort of social integration that lets me know how popular a song/album is amongst other iTunes listeners, as well as among my friends. The way I imagine this, is when you hover/click for info on an album, song, or artist, it gives you a read on how "hot" they are (whether by the amount of plays, listens, or appearances in others libraries). Also, last.fm scrobbling or equivalent needs to be built in and Facebook integration must be perfect with an accessible app on Facebook to scroll through data.

I really wish iTunes and Spotify would just merge and give me the best of both worlds.

iTunes is just shit when it comes to tags.

I use Foobar and I can create whatever custom field I want, and I can set up a search to search by keywords or whatever.

Editing and adding fields: http://i.imgur.com/8Pv3JcR.jpg

You can create and edit fields in various tagging programs (e.g., Picard, mp3tag), but iTunes just won't use or see them. For example, take the "Date" field. iTunes will only allow you to see/use the year, but you can't see or use months and days in the field (I think iTunes purchases do use them, but you're SOL for you're own stuff). This means that when you try to sort chronically by release date, you can only sort by the year but not also month and day. This is problematic (at least for me) when artists put out multiple releases in a year, and iTunes will just sort things alphabetically if they are released in the same year.

I can't comment too much on the social aspect. I prefer my music player to just play music and not be bloated with unnecessary things like social integration or a store, and something like last.fm run separately is enough for me.

Itunes wasn't really made for people who got music outside of itunes.

Truth tho is these days I use more of a combo of spotify and youtube.

I am listening to music on so many different devices I need to be in the cloud.

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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

as far as those types of services go