Hi, everyone! This week, Apple announced that it would be ending their longtime digital music market, iTunes. To make up for this change, they will roll out three new apps to compensate for the changes. Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, and the Music app.
With the downfall of digital downloads and the rise of streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify, the need for iTunes in today's music industry has slowly become eradicated. These popular streaming services offer that one single you really like if you don't like a band's full album. This seems to have once been the norm for downloads and purchases off of iTunes in the past.
While we're on the topic of the past, let's wind the clocks back twenty years: As “illegal” peer-to-peer sharing services like Napster and Limewire ravaged the music industry of merit, Steve Jobs took it as an opportunity to capitalize on the issue. He proposed a completely safe and “legal” way for people to purchase music, called iTunes. It was announced alongside the first iPod in 2001.
When researching for this article, I found a rather amusing quote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. He took a jab at these peer-to-peer services before iTunes' official launch in May of '03, saying, "It's not stealing, which is good karma."
Within the first week of iTunes' existence, there were one million downloads. By December 2003, it was twenty-five million downloads. In July of 2004? 100 million downloads worldwide.
iTunes really was a game changer for music consumption in the mid to late 2000s, as they continued to rack up total downloads in the billions. They even added movies, TV shows, and audiobooks to their library. It was in 2008 when they finally surpassed Walmart as the #1 music retailer in the U.S. At this moment, iTunes was in its prime.
In the same year, however, this random Swedish company by the name “Spotify” offered an ad-free access to a library of forty million songs. All this for a small fee of $9.99. It was a radical idea at the time.
As this company Spotify became more and more popular, iTunes faced a dilemma. The downfall of digital purchases really hurt them badly. So, they decided to do something very unusual to attract customers.
Remember when Apple put that really crappy U2 album on everyone’s iTunes account? Yeah, that backfired; many of the 500 million customers that the stunt reached wanted to delete the album. They had no option to do so, and it pissed everyone off.
To make matters worse, rumors of iTunes end began swirling around after the announcing of Apple Music in 2015. It’s the end of an era for a once premier service.
I don’t really have much more to say on the matter of this. I knew iTunes’ end would be coming soon, it was merely a matter of time before they cut it off.
The major streaming services have been complete game-changers for music consumption in the last few years. In fact, Spotify claims to have over 200 million users of their app worldwide, and 100 million being paid subscribers. Apple Music also boasts another 50 million paid subscribers.
Why would someone buy songs at $1.29 apiece when they could pretty much listen to millions upon millions for $10-15 a month? My point is, the economic price-point of these streaming services makes the demand for platforms like iTunes today very low.
I remember the joy of getting an iTunes gift card years back and buying some of the hottest new singles that I liked on the radio. I probably haven’t made a purchase on iTunes in maybe a year and a half. Digital purchases become less and less of a need for me, as I am now a Spotify loyalist. In fact, I probably get more use out of the $9.99 monthly fee for Premium than I would have with a $10-20 iTunes gift card.
While it is very sad to see such a token of nostalgia finally leave, its writing has been on the wall for a while now. This pending move by Apple is for the best, and makes the most sense logistically. Thanks for the memories, iTunes!
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