There are signs that Apple is ready to shut down its iTunes service.
A wake up many Internet users found that Apple has deleted everything iTunes had on fb, and the videos and pictures from iTunes Instagram's profile were empty, with no warning.
Apple is reported to have moved the content of the iTunes fb page to the Apple TV page on the fb, including since the account was created on April 29, 2009.
The emptiness of social media heralds a possible major change in iTunes, with Apple announcing the closure of the iTunes service at the WWDC 2019 conference, which opens on June 3, Bloomberg reported.
While the iTunes retires, Apple will launch three new software for the macOS, offering management services for music, TV movies and audio, which have been launched on iOS in the past.
In fact, the three new software is equivalent to dividing several functions of iTunes into different applications, while iTunes and iPhone for synchronization and recovery and other basic functions, may be undertaken by new music applications.
Today's iTnues music interface
iTunes
After Apple bought the copyright of the music management software called SoundJam MP, Jobs and others cut off a lot of responsible functions and improved the user interface on the basis of the original.
From the original search by singer, song name or album name, changed to a simple search box, and named the software iTunes.
Jobs officially unveiled iTunes at the Macworld conference in January 2001, and that fall Apple unveiled another music player called iPod, which comes with iTunes, bringing about a new change in the music market.
By 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Store, for 99 cents per song and sold 1 million songs in six days. "this will go down in history as a turning point in the music industry," Jobs said.
For Apple users at the time, to import music downloaded online into the iPod, the soft and hard integration strategy made the iPod and iTunes once Apple's biggest revenue pillars.
ITunes Store sold 70 million songs in its first year, while iPod once had more than 70 per cent of the music player market, and by 2007 iPod had accounted for half of Apple's total revenue.
The digital music subscription model provided by iTunes Store, which replaces the traditional music publisher to establish direct contact with users and share it with music copyright, is in fact the predecessor of Apple's App Store.
But iTunes, a software born in the PC Internet age, has been marginalized along with iPod with the advent of the mobile Internet, and iPhone and App Store have ushered in a golden decade since then.
Although Apple is constantly updating the iTunes, to integrate music, movie, TV program, podcast, iTunes U, apps, audiobooks and other features in iTunes, iTunes is more often used as a less commonly used backup and download tool.
Last year, revenue from iTunes's music download business fell to half that of 2014, while the number of Apple Music users is growing rapidly, with more paid users in the United States than Spotify., another music streaming giant.
In addition, the market share of iTunes movie rental and sales has been falling in recent years, with more than 50 percent in 2012, but only 20 percent to 35 percent in 2017, as streaming subscription services such as Netflix become mainstream, the Wall Street Journal reported. This figure is estimated to be still falling.
Apple held a hardware-free conference in March, focusing on software services such as video, news, games and mobile payment, which will become a more important part of Apple's future.
Apple service revenue hit an all-time high of $11.45 billion in the last quarter. The number of paid users currently using Apple's service and third-party businesses has reached 390 million, and Apple hopes to raise that number to 500 million by 2020.
Although iTunes is the pioneer of Apple digital service subscription model, it is no longer suitable for streaming media era. For $9 to subscribe to all the movies on Netflix or $20 for a movie on iTunes, the user's choice is obvious.
Instead, iTunes's model of bringing together a variety of media services, such as music, video, blogs, and so on, is too bloated to compete with vertical applications in streaming media such as Netflix, Spotify, so Apple's future service business map. It is also difficult to have a location for iTunes.