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In the end, Mr. Jobs' prophecy was false. People wanted to rent access to a centralized broadcast library and not pay a small fee to own each song. With the growth of streaming services, sales of music downloads have dropped. According to the Recording Industry Association, downloads now account for a smaller percentage of record sales than physical albums – a turning point that Jobs would never have seen.
In 2015, Apple tried to save iTunes by relying on its own streaming service, Apple Music. But the idea was doomed from the start. People could not understand the new Frankensteinian hybrid. Which of their songs have been hosted in the cloud? Why do they need to re-enter their Apple ID each time they wanted to read an album? Where were their downloads? Marco Arment, a long-time Apple blogger, has called iTunes "poisonous for hell."
As we are friends, I can be honest: ITunes has not aged well. In recent years, he had become a puffy nightmare, buggy. Apple has piled more and more into iTunes – movies, TV shows, podcasts – until everything is slow and confusing.
My encounters with the program were more and more annoying: I accidentally opened an audio file in iTunes, waited three minutes before loading it and had to force the application to close by frustration. (And do not even tell me that iTunes has imposed a U2 album on millions of unsuspecting people – the mid-life crisis has not even begun to describe it.)
But do not remember iTunes. Let's remember what it was: a revolutionary product that transformed the music industry, ushered in a new digital ownership model and tamed a messy and chaotic part of the Internet by building something simple and elegant to replace it .
My 15-year-old man, drunk with freedom and overwhelmed with pirated MP3s, could have been delighted by the disappearance of a company-controlled music exchange center. But I feel a bit nostalgic to see an old Internet icon sink into obsolescence, and know that the iTunes library that I spent all those hours perfecting is collecting dust on a hard drive somewhere in my closet, another victim of progress.
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