The era of iTunes is over; the relic is going to be broken down by the company. Apple’s announcement, during its annual developer’s conference, stated that the iTunes app will be divided into three separate macOS apps. The company will divide the application into multiple, more-focused apps on the Mac: Apple Music for music, Apple TV for TV and movies, and Apple Podcasts for podcasts.

iTunes had been launched as a program to manage your media library, listening to songs, and buying new content. It had played a pivotal role in the digital revolution of the 2000s after it first launched in 2001, with a huge impact on the music industry. iTunes was partially attributed with abating the acute bleeding to piracy the recording industry faced amidst the fame of the MP3 boom on peer-to-peer file-sharing applications like Napster. The program was also the home ground for the iPod, one of the first of many products CEO Steve Jobs chaperoned when helming the company back to success after returning to his leadership position in 1998.

It was acclaimed as a robust tool for managing your music library in that it granted you to sort, manage, and play the music you purchased from Apple’s online store. It also lets you import music files secured from other sources and even synchronize them to your cloud-based library. Furthermore, Apple introduced advanced media categories to iTunes as it bolstered its services and content offerings: movies, TV, podcasts, books, and audiobooks. iTunes was also the elementary approach for backing up, updating, and managing iOS devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad before iCloud took fame in recent years.

As the features stockpiled, hordes of users felt that the application became over-complicated and complex. Furthermore, Apple launched a streaming music service called Apple Music in 2015, which added even more layers. Some critics began pointing to the application as a prominent illustration of unintuitive and even atrocious user-experience design, hardly something Apple wanted to be known for.

New upgrades to be brought in by Apple

Apple did not state what would happen with iTunes for Windows. Apple also failed to say how existing users would be able to port media libraries from iTunes to the new apps. Every functionality offered by iTunes will still be offered, just in a different application. More and more users are moving forward into the streaming era, a landscape of kaleidoscopic subscription services for music, TV, film, and more. Apple sees its future primarily in this segment.