Long Live The Pioneer
Apple’s annual WWDC conference just announced not too long ago today that iTunes is officially dead, it’s been collapsed under the aegis of the iconic Apple brand into 3 parts, Apple Music, Apple Podcast, and Apple TV.
The demise of iTunes has been speculated for quite awhile now since Apple has created other media options for music, content, and streaming, WWDC also went as far today to introduce iRadio, holding over 100,000 stations that one can listen to from any part of the country, and even the world.
iTunes first hit the Apple scene 15 years back on 2004, forever changing the way the world at large consumes music, sending shockwaves to the music industry, creating a change in pricing structure for singles and albums from artists, and raising new questions about royalty distribution and payout with artists.
Those drastically affected by iTunes, and YouTube collectively was the music industry itself, leading record labels to rethink their strategy in the way they discovered and acquired new talent, effectively crumbling the notion of so-called trends in music for a period of time.
Another casualty in the iTunes and YouTube revolution was MTV, the place where video killed the radio star, was now killed by songs, and music videos that can be downloaded anytime by people, who didn’t want to wait for MTV to play their favorite video, radio stations felt the heat too of downloads and streaming as they now had to compete with iTunes, forcing changes in formats, but radio eventually caught up as best as they could sticking to their profitable tried and true formats as streaming took more presence over downloads.
Though, iTunes brought Apple back from the brink early last decade, iTunes now finds itself buried for good as the brand Apple evolves more than Apple itself even knows, getting into original content, and Apple TV 4K releasing its first original series “For All Mankind” this fall.