It was the beginning of a new era. Digital music seemingly was born the day the first iPod was released along with iTunes. Instead of going to the local store to buy an entire CD, you could just download the music on your computer and your iPod to carry around with you. It revolutionized the music industry while causing a lot of controversy along the way.
Now, this era might be coming to an end. Nearly 20 years after the launch of iTunes, Apple is looking to replace it with a better program. In fact, Apple is going to announce this change today at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. They believe it’s time to retire iTunes and create something smoother and more in-tune with the modern listener.
While iTunes certainly changed the way we listen to music, it wasn’t perfect. There were a lot of outdated features Apple fans didn’t like. In turn, this change has been rumored for several years. Apple wants to implement a faster, sleeker, more modern version. They even want to separate the different functionalities that are currently combined on the iTunes platform, like movies, podcasts, and TV.
Apple’s Separate Platforms
Apple really wants to expand their brand. By taking iTunes and breaking it up into three different platforms, it will become a multifaceted entertainment company. It also will allow the three different areas to run smoothly and efficiently rather than all combined and bogging down the one. It also wants to expand other entertainment apps.
According to other rumors about Apple’s intent, they really want to beef up Messages, Mail, and Books, taking pages from Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google. They even want to start creating original content. They recently announced a new project starring Steve Carell and Reese Witherspoon.
While many people are cheering for the death of iTunes, ready for a better, faster system, it should get the credit it deserves for changing the entertainment world. In the early 2000’s, this platform was revolutionary and has stood the test of time where others have failed. At the time, Napster had the music industry on edge.
It was found that Napster was allowing users to illegally download music for free. It was definitely the new wave of the future, but after Napster went down, Apple came and filled the void. It took Napster’s formula of downloading single-file music entries and was a great compromise for musicians. Still, many bands to this day refuse to allow their music to be played on iTunes.
Bands like Metallica were against the platform for a long time. Tool, another popular rock band, still has not taken the leap, much to the dismay of fans. Microsoft and Sony put out their own versions, like the Zune, but they didn’t last very long. They didn’t seem to have the same creative edge that Apple seems to have had.
“(Microsoft and Sony) were technology companies that knew how to build disc players and hardware, but they weren’t companies that had demonstrated Apple’s sophistication with regard to the software,” Warner Music’s vice president Paul Vidich recalled to Rolling Stone in 2013, on the iTunes Store’s 10th anniversary. “It really took a company that was able to bridge those two things and come up with an attractive consumer product.”
