The End of iTunes?

Kirk McElhearn, writing at The Mac Security Blog:

While some can cast aside the accumulated goodwill of a brand name on a whim, Apple doesn’t like to do so. Even after splitting the iTunes app, Apple retained the iTunes Store name for selling digital content. You access the iTunes Store in the Music app on the Mac to buy music, and the iPhone and iPad still have iTunes Store apps. But there is some overlap: you can buy and rent movies, for example, in both the iTunes Store and TV apps, as Apple tries to shift purchases to the latter.

Soon, all that will be left of the iTunes brand is the iTunes Store for music. And people buy much less music [than] in the past, having mostly shifted to streaming. Will the iTunes name finally fade away as music sales dwindle? It’s hard to imagine Apple stopping digital music sales entirely; even if fewer people buy digital music, the market isn’t dead, not by a long shot. Global digital music sales peaked in 2012 at around $4.4 billion, and in 2021 they had dropped to $1.1 billion. That’s a decline of about 75%, but Apple still earns a hefty amount of money from selling digital music.

I’ve been wondering about the same thing for a few years. I purchase/rent all my movies and TV shows on my Apple TV, where “iTunes” isn’t mentioned. (And in the age of streaming, I really only purchase/rent movies — the TV shows I watch are all streamed nowadays.) So why keep the iTunes Store app around on iOS — they could just add a Store tab to the Music app. Buy your music — if you buy music — in Music, and buy your movies in TV.

The only reason I can think not to do this is that the Music app is already so jam-packed.

★ Tuesday, 24 October 2023