It’s an end of an era folks, iTunes is ending, and in its place will be the Apple apps ‘Music, ‘TV’ and ‘Podcasts’.
With the latest macOS update, ’10.15 Catalina’, iTunes has officially been ‘taken out back’. The new update tears apart iTunes and spreads its services across three more modern apps.
With #macOSCatalina, your media library moves from iTunes into three new apps. Learn more about Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, and where to find the iTunes Store: https://t.co/4ZtrsJqPU0 pic.twitter.com/j4ixG9EosR
— Apple Support (@AppleSupport) 7 October 2019
Apple has always been at the very forefront of technological and social revolution, it’s a company all about selling game-changers. iTunes back in 2001 was one of these game-changers.
It served as a solution to the epidemic sweeping across the music industry, the issue of simply ripping songs’ MP3 files and getting all your music, albeit low quality, for free. Steve Jobs was however on the case, and created iTunes, a service to buy your music, making it higher quality and easy to find.
Fast forward to modern times though, the premise of iTunes has not aged well, with apps like Spotify and Amazon Music, people no longer buy their music, they stream it instead. The idea of paying a flat fee for a single song when you can just buy a subscription to unlimited songs seems crazy now.
According to the RIAA’s 2018 report, 75% of the U.S. music industry’s revenue came from streaming and only 11% from digital downloads.
If you’re a loyal supporter of iTunes however, fear not, you can still access all your iTunes purchases and history through the Apple ‘Music’ app. The app itself is of course a music and video streaming service, home to 50 million songs, it is a direct competitor to Spotify.
So long iTunes, you served us well through those 00s years.
