Apple is considering killing off iTunes music downloads entirely, a report from Digital Music News states.
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So while the timescales reported in the Digital Music News piece may be highly unrealistic, I don’t doubt for a moment that a company as forward-looking as Apple has indeed held internal meetings in which it discussed a move it will nearly certainly make at some point in the future. The other possibility would be for Apple to allow iTunes music sales to hang around for another three to four years, before dropping the curtain on what was once the most popular way to sell music online to the public. Roughly a week ago, music enthusiast and Apple Music subscriber James Pinkstone published a blog post detailing how roughly 60GB of music had been wiped off his hard drive by Apple Music. Streaming services have been siphoning revenue from downloads as consumers move away from iTunes and towards Spotify, Pandora, and of course, Apple Music.
If this does happen, it’s likely to help streaming services – and not just Apple’s – grow even further.
It took until the end of the day, but an APPLE spokesperson finally denied the wildly spreading rumor that it will terminate its music downloading business within two years.
Music downloads are dwindling. (NASDAQ:AAPL) should completely abandon it, given the fact that the company itself essentially devised the market for music download sales through iTunes. People still buy a lot of downloads. In the same way, iTunes has always been there, however since times are changing, it’s time to start making some decisions which will ultimately shape the future of music listening.
Apple is expected to unveil a big update to Apple Music at its annual developers conference this June. Iovine and other executives from Beats are pushing for Apple to “deemphasize iTunes and plow money into the on-demand streaming service that Beats built”.
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So, if this is what’s happening to music, cars and pretty much everything else we consume, why do some firms still insist on building and maintaining their own in-house trading systems?
