I still buy songs that I really enjoy and from Artists I really like and see in concert.
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It's Been 22 Years Since Apple Launched the iTunes Store
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Since it's not adjusted for inflation that means in real dollar terms industry revenues are actually a bit lower than they were. What they should be doing is comparing global music sales to world GDP. If you did this you'd find that music sales have grown 3x slower than other economic sectors. So no, these are quite bad numbers.
Well not really. That is just twisting the data all over the place to suit the narrative.
If you adjust for inflation 2023/24 vs peak iTunes/digital downloads era (say 2005) the industry revenue is very similar. Really does not support the notion that streaming has destroyed the music industry.
I still prefer buying music on the store over streaming. I don't have to worry about my internet connection going down preventing me from listening to music, but more importantly I don't have to worry about some legal issue or lack of general interest causing music getting pulled from the service entirely.
So long as you keep a local backup your iTunes music is yours for good.
So long as you keep a local backup your iTunes music is yours for good.
To my knowledge, even with the app name change, still only music app that gives users the ability to create smart playlist. Though I think it still can only be done on MacOs at least the playlist show up and work on iOs devices. Really hope they bring smart playlists to iOs. Highly underrated feature for those who want to make specific playlist without having to add songs one by one.
Lucky you. iTunes came into my country at the end of it's life (right before Apple Music) and that's when I gave up torrenting as well and bought 2 songs and one album.
Actually, it's always been this way. Most people only hear about the stars. The vast majority of musicians don't make money and never have.
Heck, just read about it. It's well-known and in many fields: books, art, music. The fact is, there isn't an a mass audience for most stuff. But today there are many, many other ways to find your audience than there used to be. Just look at OnlyFans or Patreon.
For those of us around at the time the original iTunes was Casady & Greene's SoundJam released with an Apple label.
I bought SO MUCH Pepsi because of this. Probably got a lot of weird looks in the store tipping bottles but I probably got 30-40 free songs. They did it two years. One of my favorite iTunes memories.
I used to print out the receipt for every song and put it in a book. I was a poor college student so I only bought things occasionally.
I remember buying Dark Side of the Moon when they finally went DRM free. Nobody remembers that anymore but it was a big deal at the time.
That's the thing though. You couldn't delete it. To the point where Apple actually had to release a software tool to delete it for you. And it still came back on its own sometime. Now the only way to delete it is to call Apple support and have them manually remove it from your account.
The tone of this comments section illustrates how far Apple has fallen with their core products. Everything they make ends up in the stagnation of 3-year+ update cycles or totally turned to crap. Apple is well on its way to becoming another half-assed tech conglomerate that nobody trusts. HP with a Gucci logo.
They're already losing their grip on the phone market and I don't think a $2,300+ foldable is gonna save them especially when it will eat into iPad sales.
As far as chips go, they didn't plan for unified memory to be so big for AI - they got lucky with timing. I'm sure competitors are working on similar solutions for users who want to run large AI models without massive clusters. That's assuming future models even need the resources they currently do.
They're already losing their grip on the phone market and I don't think a $2,300+ foldable is gonna save them especially when it will eat into iPad sales.
As far as chips go, they didn't plan for unified memory to be so big for AI - they got lucky with timing. I'm sure competitors are working on similar solutions for users who want to run large AI models without massive clusters. That's assuming future models even need the resources they currently do.
Another thing I loved about the old Itunes was it really got me into stats like last played and play count. Things updated instantaneously and it was one of the best management tools I ever saw. We were transitioning from the Kwazza and Morpheous era of music piracy and Apple came in and gave us a simple way to collect music legally. It was at the time one of the most customer friendly things apple did and made me turn my dislike of them (which was like 15 years since I hated the original machintosh school computers) into a trustworthy company. We have argued countlessly where they are now but at the time they were revolutionary and customer friendly.
And it got me into Podcasts which is a whole other story in itself.
And it got me into Podcasts which is a whole other story in itself.
While I think your language is a little strong, I agree it was perplexing that so many people were so upset about getting a free album. In retrospect, it would have been better to make the album free to download over the course of a day or a week or something, so that people who didn't want it wouldn't end up with a copy. But the amount of complaining about getting the free album seemed pretty excessive. I got a copy, never did listen to it, but I am also not upset that I was given it.
Same thing as the 12 Days of Christmas (I think that's what it was called) that Apple used to do with iTunes around the holidays. They would give away something each day & you usually got one movie. Then people started complaining about the movie selection and whatever else Apple gave away. And then Apple stopped doing the giveaways.
The early iTunes both Mac and Windows was a great piece of software and the store too. I bought albums all the time from them. I had an job that required a lot of audio work it was a great tool. Sadly in typical Apple fashion they started screwing it up. Features started disappearing like other Apple software does. The store kept changing policies on DRM. As year went buy I moved to other platforms to buy music from. I'm back using Apple Music application but get constantly frustrated with Apple limitation especally with playlist that were such a great tool in the early days. Can't mix burn CD with Apple in playlist. They push so hard to try and make you buy from the current Apple Music store. So I subscribe to Apple Music as my streaming, but most the time when I want to purchase music I'm go somewhere else.
On April 28, 2003, Apple introduced the iTunes Store, its iconic digital marketplace for downloading music. 22 years later, most of us don't purchase songs and albums individually anymore, and the iTunes Store doesn't exist as it once did, but played a major role in Apple history.
Early Years
When it launched, the iTunes Store was only for the Mac, but it expanded to Windows PCs before the end of 2003. It was a one-stop shop for music that could be loaded onto an iPod, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs inked deals with a number of different record labels to get it up and running.
In the first 18 hours following the launch of the iTunes Store, Apple sold ~275,000 tracks, with songs priced at $0.99 at the time. Less than a week after launch, Apple sold 1 million songs, and at the two week mark, Apple was at 2 million songs sold.
By 2008, five years after the iTunes Store launched, Apple's iTunes Store was the biggest music vendor in the United States. In 2010, it was the largest music seller in the world, bringing in over a billion dollars.
Pricing
The iTunes Store sold songs for $0.99 in the United States, though some were more expensive at $1.29. Albums were priced at $9.99 by default, but distributors were able to set higher prices. Apple regularly offered iTunes promotions, including weekly free songs.
Beyond Music
Before the App Store launched in 2008, the iTunes Store also housed apps, plus it was home to digital books before the launch of the iBooks Store. Apple also used the iTunes Store for distributing podcasts, TV shows, and movies.
The Rise of Streaming Music
In the 2010s, interest in streaming music started to pick up, cutting into music purchases. Streaming services like Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, and Pandora launched earlier in the decade, but more people became interested in streaming music when Spotify launched in the United States in 2011.
Beats Music launched in 2014, and was quickly purchased by Apple when Apple acquired the Beats brand. Apple ended up turning Beats Music into Apple Music, a Spotify competitor that launched on June 30, 2015. By 2016, just 24 percent of the music industry's revenue came from digital music sales, with streaming services bringing in over 50 percent of total revenue.
The iTunes Store Today
You'll still find the iTunes Store app on your iPhone, but it's a little harder to find on the Mac. It's available as a dedicated section in the Apple Music app for those who still purchase music.
TV shows and movies were split out into the TV app, while podcasts were split into the Podcasts app as part of changes made in macOS Catalina back in 2019. The Windows version of the iTunes Store stuck around longer, but in 2024, Apple launched dedicated Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices apps for Windows users to replace iTunes.
Article Link: It's Been 22 Years Since Apple Launched the iTunes Store
Apple is a company that comes out with something really good then over the years keeps removing features and making you wonder why your still using it.
I remembered there were music lawyers pursuing illegal downloaders back then, probably long before iTunes were announced. Remember Napster?
Which they’ll regret when they retire on a fixed income and don’t want to spend $75 bucks a month to stream their music. I pay for Apple Music but when I find a song or album I like, I buy it precisely because I want to own my music and not rent it monthly so when the time comes I can say bye, bye streaming service. It’s probably a Gen X / older Millennial thing (I was born in 81) but I still believe in having either a physical or a digitally ripped version of my music and my movies. I’ve still got my CD collection from my teens and early to mid-20’s before DRM free digital music stores were a thing and I’ve still got my old VHS tapes, my DVD’s and now Blu-Rays. Yeah, it’s technically a license, but without DRM in an industry standard digital format with daily backups good luck revoking my licenses. I could cut the streaming cord tomorrow and have more than a week’s worth of music and hundreds of hours of movies.
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My uncle left me his music collection. One of the greatest gifts, if not the greatest, I have ever received. Primarily records and cassettes, but some CDs too. (Oh! And some 8 Tracks!) I do not know how music streamers will ever be able to share their collections in the future like this. It will just be gone with them. That's very sad to me.
I just got back into buying music on iTunes vs Apple Music. I am an old man who mainly listens to old music so offing the newest doesn't do anything for me
Sadly I had a huge mp3 library from old cds that I lost in a move but ended up losing that (lol I wonder if I readied Music Match if my old library would come back?)
iTunes & Apple movies are 1 thing that tie me completely into the apple ecosystem. Buying the digital movies / tv shows / music & have Apple hold it (The only company I trust not to go out of business) is the biggest value ad for me
Sadly I had a huge mp3 library from old cds that I lost in a move but ended up losing that (lol I wonder if I readied Music Match if my old library would come back?)
iTunes & Apple movies are 1 thing that tie me completely into the apple ecosystem. Buying the digital movies / tv shows / music & have Apple hold it (The only company I trust not to go out of business) is the biggest value ad for me
I did the Limewire thing ages ago. as well as buying music from iTunes all these years in addition to the many physical CDs I had where I ripped my preferred music to my library. The vast majority of my music is old, from the '50s to the '90s and early 2000s with the bulk of it from the '60s to '80s. Once in a while I'll hear something current that clicks for me, but that's become increasingly more rare. I have a fair sized Bluray and DVD library of films of shows I really like. I have very little video on my computer or iPad.
I miss going to the movies to enjoy things on the big screen, but it's much more enjoyable going with friends. Yes, I have a very nice 65in. Samsung television that's nice to watch, but it just doesn't feel as eventful as going out to the movies. And like music it's become more challenging to find film and series that appeal to me. This isn't to say all things older were great--no, we had our fair share of crap back in the day. But the general sensibility in productions today leave something to be desired for me. That said I soldier on and manage to find things I enjoy to watch.
In terms of streaming I watch a lot of stuff on Youtube. Much of it is the kind of material I used to find on television such as History, A&E and Discovery channel, but they have become something quite different that doesn't work for me anymore. So now I find it on Youtube.
Hey, I still buy music from the iTunes store periodically--the fact that you (still) get decent-quality DRM-free files out of it means that, unlike any streaming option and even the vast majority of digital things you "buy" but are actually dependent on a server somewhere, you actually do own a thing that isn't going to vanish because some company decides to stop giving you what you paid for.
Funny thing is, the very early days of the iTunes Store, music did have FairPlay DRM that required you to log into the associated account and only allowed you to authorize a half-dozen devices simultaneously to play the music.
That system is still in place even today--I have a handful of oddball tracks that were never re-released in DRM-free form, and whenever I upgrade a computer I need to de-authorize the old one and re-authorize the new one to be able to listen to them. Given how few people must still have DRM'd tracks, and the engineering effort that must be required to keep that DRM working, I'm honestly surprised Apple hasn't dropped it at this point. Maybe the fact that it's still in use for video means it's easy to keep around for AAC files too.
Funny thing is, the very early days of the iTunes Store, music did have FairPlay DRM that required you to log into the associated account and only allowed you to authorize a half-dozen devices simultaneously to play the music.
That system is still in place even today--I have a handful of oddball tracks that were never re-released in DRM-free form, and whenever I upgrade a computer I need to de-authorize the old one and re-authorize the new one to be able to listen to them. Given how few people must still have DRM'd tracks, and the engineering effort that must be required to keep that DRM working, I'm honestly surprised Apple hasn't dropped it at this point. Maybe the fact that it's still in use for video means it's easy to keep around for AAC files too.