How we listen to music today is much different than in years of Napster and Limewire. iTunes revolutionized the music industry by providing a legal alternative for music downloads, but today there is a significant shift toward subscription-based streaming. Streaming services generated 75% of the U.S. music industry revenues in 2018, and digital downloads, including iTunes, accounted for only 11% (Flanagan and Garsd). The number of digital downloads is continuing to fall, indicating that the product life cycle (PLC) of services like iTunes have reached their Decline stage. The most challenging PLC stage of iTunes was its Introduction because of its novelty. The number of innovators, who are the first people to use the product, was low, and Apple’s service was only accounted for about 1.5% of total music industry revenue in the U.S. by 2005 (Golijan). Apple had to work hard to convince the artists because Steve Job’s proposal of ten-dollar albums was not persuasive when physical copies cost 16 dollars and above at the time (Golijan). The success and decline of iTunes can be related to the fashion style of PLC. Downloading music was conventional during the last decade, but trends are moving to other directions right now.
The life of iTunes could have been extended had Apple integrated streaming capability from the start and not mixing everything into one application. By the end of Maturity, iTunes had become slow and full of bugs, because Apple tried to put all media types in one place (Roose). Eventually, iTunes is to be split into several different apps for music, videos, and podcasts. But the market of streaming is already dominated by companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Google, so chances of Apple are low.
The next era of music consumption is about streaming services and internet radios like Spotify, Pandora, iHeart Radio, and Netflix. The revenue amounts they are generating are steadily increasing year-by-year (Flanagan and Garsd). With the number of digital music downloads approaching the bottom, products like iTunes are facing their decline and may be discontinued entirely in the coming years. Just like Apple ended the age of MP3 downloads and physical CDs at the beginning of the 2000s, iTunes is experiencing the same fate.
Works Cited
- Flanagan, Andrew, and Jasmine Garsd. “iTunes’ Death Is All About How We Listen to Music Today.” National Public Radio, 2019. Web.
- Golijan, Rosa. “iTunes Turns 10: How Apple Music Store Killed Old Music Industry.” NBC News, 2013. Web.
- Roose, Kevin. “A Farewell for iTunes.” The New York Times, 2019. Web.