iTune in, iTune out
Apple turns off music app
The start of the “digital music revolution”, according to late Apple founder Steve Jobs, began in 2001. Then, the music industry was in freefall with millions of people downloading songs illegally from file-sharing sites such as Napster.
In the US alone, 320 million blank CDs were sold in one year as people ripped and burnt their music on to hard disks.
But Jobs wasn’t about to let Apple miss out.
Almost two decades ago at Macworld, he revealed Apple’s version of jukebox software, named iTunes, designed to organise music libraries.
“iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution,” he said.
The launch of iTunes came at just the right time for Apple.
A few months later, the company unveiled the iPod – the device that put “1,000 songs in your pocket”.
Two years on came the iTunes Store, meaning users could download songs directly from Apple.
After hitting record revenues of $28bn in 1999, the record industry was on the verge of a historic slump.
“It was the peak of its hubris, but the bottom fell out of the industry. Apple became the one company trying to combat file sharing,” says Danny Champion, a music licensing consultant at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute.
The record industry could not escape the rise of digital music – and Apple was there to step in as the bulwark against piracy.
Digital music proved a huge success for Apple and a way to stem the sudden decline the music industry was suffering as piracy ran rampant, even if the industry itself struggled to recover – iTunes gave users a way to easily download and search, paying a few rands for an album, later adding films, downloads, TV shows and podcasts.
“The launch of iTunes at the time where you could simply download any music was revolutionary,” says Gregor Pryor, head of technology at the law firm Reed Smith and an expert on music licensing.
Music downloads exploded. The iPod had sold more than 100 million units by 2007, making it the top-selling digital music product.
By 2014, iTunes had more than 800 million user accounts as it grew to be not only the main way to manage music but a sprawling central hub for iPhone users to register and manage their devices.
While Apple may have ridden the wave of the digital music revolution, the download era that once supported its growth is now coming to an end.
Apple announced this week at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose in the US that it would no longer offer its iTunes app.
The iTunes Store, where consumers can buy digital songs to keep, will continue to exist, but be less prevalent, and it is clear the era of music downloads is winding down.
A trio of new products will replace iTunes – a revamped Music app, a TV app and a Podcasts app. Users will still have their music collections, but it is clear Apple’s efforts are focused on streaming.
Downloading music has slowly been eclipsed by a new kind of access – digital streaming. Downloads gave users a taste of removing physical ownership of records – now, they would give up that ownership entirely.
The death of iTunes, once ubiquitous for digital music, could even be seen as somewhat overdue.
Streaming cut the era of music downloads short. By 2018, download sales had dropped 58% from their 2014 peak and were doing worse even than physical music sales. Greg Harwood, a director at consultancy Simon-Kulcher, notes: “iTunes has become outdated and less relevant, especially the use of downloads which has become old-fashioned.”
But it would be a mistake to believe Apple is not well tuned for this digital streaming age. When Apple launched its Apple Music service in 2015 it appeared to be some way behind the competition: Spotify, the Swedish music streaming company, had been running since 2008, giving users access to 40 million songs for a flat monthly fee.
But its launch has arguably proved the greatest software success Apple has seen in the Tim Cook era. The new service took on Spotify head on – with Apple having immediate access to billions of iPhone users they could push their service with discounted rates and sweetener introductory deals.
Apple Music has since soared to 56 million paying users. While Spotify still dominates with more than 100 million, Apple has a slightly faster growth rate.
It comes as Apple moves its business aggressively towards “services” – trying to grow products such as music and video streaming that rely on paid-for memberships. A revamped music product seems the obvious choice.
While the music industry has returned to growth on the back of streaming, it has never returned to the numbers it enjoyed at the height of its power – and now more of that income than ever is returning to technology companies, rather than to labels or artists, Champion notes.
“It’s all a big race for subscriptions,” he says, “but it still doesn’t answer the problem that the value that has gone out of music.”
It may not be the music revolution some had dreamed of.
But for Apple, digital music is likely to continue to play on.