Is iTunes ON The Decline?
Many say “yes”, and have been saying so for quite some time. Read more for details…
When iTunes was just introduced in 2001, it was a service that was the first of its kind. A way to store and purchase music legally, it not only synced with Apple hardware but could also be used as a piece of software on a non-Apple device.
Despite naysayers who insisted that a piece of Apple software would never be run on a competitor’s hardware, the innovation was initially a hit and could not have come at a more crucial time industry-wise. Artists and record labels were reeling due to consumers who were no longer rushing out to buy albums, but were instead downloading them illegally via services like Napster. For a few years, iTunes and Apple seemed like they might herald the revival of the music industry by giving consumers a way to legally purchase individual songs or albums from their computers, and instantly listen to them on their devices.
From The Top Of The Charts
However, more than ten years on from iTunes’ heyday, the service seems to be losing relevance. Even after introducing its own streaming service, Apple Music, iTunes is struggling to retain users and competitors like Spotify are enjoying market dominance.
So what exactly went wrong? There are a few reasons why iTunes has struggled to retain users in the last decade. iTunes always had a clunky and unintuitive interface, which was strange considering that Apple as a company is heralded for its exceptional design and user-centric approach. Digital natives who grew up using Apple products were struggling to navigate each new update of iTunes thanks to too many clicks required to get to what you wanted, as well as too many collapsible menu options. Strangely, this is something that has seemed to get worse as the company updated the software, not better.
On The Way Down
The second major issue is the aforementioned shift to streaming, or the idea that consumers don’t even need to own the music they listen to, but rather just need to have constant access. While Apple did get in on this “access over ownership” trend with its rollout of Apple Music last year—which is clumsily integrated with iTunes—it did so much later than the industry leader, Spotify. When Apple first rolled out Apple Music with a free one month trial, things seemed promising. But by October of last year, three months after its launch, the company had lost 40% of its usership.
Another major criticism recently has come from a series of high profile pieces online detailing how the Apple Music subscription resulted in files being deleted from iTunes. In a piece that was published on several outlets, including Huffington Post, freelance composer James Pinkstone wrote that “through the Apple Music subscription, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.”
This piece went viral and further proved that the integration of iTunes and Apple Music has been less than rosy. It also called into question the company’s aims when it comes to ownership of media and providing a streaming service.
To The Bottom
iTunes’ decline proves that just because a major player has invested time and resources into a certain area, it doesn’t mean guaranteed success. In this case, it seems like Apple’s late entrance into the streaming game and its failure to iron out chronic design issues have made the service increasingly irrelevant.