Bye bye iTunes

Not forever but...




That´s what scares me with Steam!

Red

At this point it's irrelevant anyway (at least in the US) since over 70% of the consumer music market is now streaming. MP3/digital sales have been plummeting as well as CD sales.

LP's are a misleading story because while sales of LP's have actually increased modestly over the past few years it is still a very small segment of the total market. It's currently around 3-5 percent of the total market share. So yes it is a growing segment but it's a growing NICHE segment.

LPs might be nice, but a proper album must be produced to go along with them. They're okay as singles, but album making seems to be a lost art, with rare exceptions. Stuff like Alan Parsons Project, Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or David Byrne's madness are a thing of the past--which is a shame, because a good, cohesive album is a righteous experience.

One album that stands out over the last five or so years, if I can call it an album, but is surely thematic, is Lazerhawk's "Skull and Shark."



I wrote the last third of my most recent novel with this coursing through my ears and mind. Quite moving.

However, the aforementioned Alan Parsons Project had a wonderful knack with putting together brilliant, thematic LPs. One of my favorites:




"The Wall," however, is musical Shakespeare.

This article is almost a year old but the overriding trends have not changed:


https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/20/riaa-streaming-now-generates-75-of-music-revenue/


Of course, the situation is probably a bit different in other countries.

Um, sorry to disappoint, but iTunes isn't really "going away."

What's happening is they've spreading out the one-stop-app for movies, songs, podcasts, etc. into specialist programs.

So one will have to watch movies on the AppleTV program within the Mac OS.

The iTunes store itself will still remain as it is, and one's library will remain intact.

For those of us with PC's, the ability to buy, download, and sync devices using the iTunes Store will remain largely the same.

Ipads, iPods, etc., will have to have the singular apps put on them.

I think the main point of the video is not that the itunes app is going away/evolving (as Dart explained). The point of the video was more about the MP3 format rapidly dropping off in popularity. Most people no longer "purchase" music. It's all about a subscription to stream music. I still buy music I really like, but I have to admit that on those months where I want to buy more than one MP3 album, I can't help that think for $10 that month I could listen to as many of those albums as often as I want.

I'm 37, and even in my age group most people I know stream music and rarely buy anything. I have some younger employees, and they simply don't buy music. It's all streaming.