Apple’s rumored move to remove iTunes permanently suggests that subscription-based music models are here to stay
By Shaan Bisht; Published on June 2, 2019, 6:29 pm.
Since the early years of Pandora Radio and Spotify back in the 2010s, the idea of streaming the music that you wanted to hear again and again, rather than buying for every individual song that you wanted, was still being developed. After all, streaming music works in two ways, or more specifically, for two groups of people: the customers and the artists themselves. Both want to get the maximum value out of a single stream of revenue: the customers want to listen to their favorite music and support the artists without having to expend a high amount of clams while at the same time, the artists want to get their paychecks and do right by their fellow fans. It is difficult to get everyone what they want, especially with multiple controversies over the past years that dealt directly with money.
For example, in 2017, Spotify came under heavy fire from an artist by the name of Taylor Swift, who sought equal compensation to people both big and small in the music industry and targeted the broken monetary system that the Swedish streaming company had enforced since its inception. The situation escalated when Swift took her entire music library off of not only Spotify but other streaming services as well, until a settlement could be reached and the income would distributed in a more proper manner. This is where understanding how everyone gets paid through streaming works, and how the rumors surrounding Apple’s removal of its long-used iTunes service can spell an end to an era.
Unlike services like iTunes, where customers would buy music and that money would be then distributed between the parent company (ie. Apple) and the artist and representation, companies like Spotify pay themselves and the artists based on how popular a song is and the number of streams that the song has. This is a similar model of how radio stations generate revenue and given the staying power of radio (aka a much longer time than iTunes itself), the question doesn’t come down to whether or not money will be generated (spoiler alert: it will. A LOT.). With more than 8 prominent music streaming services (like the ones above) already existing in the world, one might stop to ponder why Apple would even bother pulling its iTunes services out of rotation.
On that particular matter, it simply boils down to a couple of reasons: 1) Apple has already had its own music streaming service in operation for a while now (the mixed bag called Apple Music) and 2) not many people use it in general. For me personally, I find it hard to sit down and manually transfer music and movies through a quite frankly agonizing process involving cables and slow transfer rates. Perhaps it is because that I have become spoiled with the new generation of technology, what with the easy downloading of playlists from Spotify and crystal clear music quality from any streaming service. But maybe, with Apple letting go of its once-premier media center service, it will be able to focus on something else for the near future.
Image Cred: Gizmodo.com
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