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When the music critic Leor Galil was at university in the early 2000s, he spent countless hours curing his vast iTunes library: burning CDs on his hard drive, downloading MP3 files over the Internet, sorting endless in his digital record store.
"It was my whole world at the time," said Galil, an editor for the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly.
That's why Apple's decision to kill iTunes after 18 years of basic approval on Mac and PC desktops around the world was felt by Galil as an end of the era. And while the technology giant announced its intention to split iTunes into three standalone applications – Music, TV and Podcasts – the legacy of the software was beginning to be felt.
iTunes, launched with fanfare in 2001, has enabled the computer company to become a major player in the traditional entertainment industry, anchoring the digital music market for the mainstream.
The program's music store, brimming with hit singles and catalog rarities, was eventually expanded to include movies and television shows from major Hollywood studios. The store has evolved to become a one-stop shop for consumers who are just getting used to buying online media without any physical manifestation.
"iTunes has made a major contribution to the music industry," said Nolan Gasser, composer and former chief musicologist for Pandora, a popular Internet radio service that, like Spotify, has eventually picked up some of the cultural real estate that Apple had monopolized.
"We have to remember that it had happened when it was easier to steal music than to buy it online," said Gasser, referring to the heyday of file-sharing programs legally. doubtful such as Napster. "Apple has made commercial support easy, it has facilitated the purchase of individual songs, it has given people great access."
iTunes has not missed critics, though. In recent years, he had become the laughingstock of technical journalists and design enthusiasts, who had indulged in software for its increasingly cluttered and clumsy interface and apparent irrelevance in the cloud storage era. and streaming on demand.
But advocates of the program – obsessed audiophiles who cherished their custom libraries to entertainment executives who took offense at the clandestine world of music piracy – have nevertheless found lasting value in the tool.
ITunes library files still give some consumers a sense of ownership and security as most media companies turn to streaming and transferring amounts of data to cloud storage systems .
"We treat companies as librarians, but they are not, it's great to have a library of MP3 files that you can control," said music critic Galil.
The iTunes store has also offered consumers a great way to download music, ripping millions of people out of Napster's clutches and peer-to-peer programs like Limewire – and encouraging consumers to pay for some digital content, albums hip-hop to movie rentals.
"Consumers do not want to be treated like criminals and artists do not want their work to be stolen," Jobs said at the company's announcement in 2003. "The iTunes Music Store offers a revolutionary solution for consumers. two".
However, in the coming years, Apple is clearly seeing the financial benefit of dropping individual sales in favor of subscription-based streaming, according to David Arditi, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas in Arlington, which studies the intersection of music, culture and technology.
"They are putting their eggs in the Apple Music cart," said Arditi, referring to Apple's proposed streaming music service at $ 10 a month. "We found that an average consumer was spending around $ 45 a year on recorded music, but a company like Apple is aware of it and estimates that it's better to charge $ 10 a month, or more." $ 120 a year. "
In this sense, iTunes has fallen victim to the same cultural trends and the same financial forces that helped Netflix defeat DVDs and Blu-ray discs: Why manage your media library while an algorithm can do it for you?
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