“Apple is now preparing to completely terminate music download offerings on the iTunes Store, with an aggressive, two-year termination timetable actively being considered and gaining favor,” Paul Resnikoff reports for Digital Music News.
“According to sources to Digital Music News with close and active business relationships with Apple, discussions are now focused ‘not on if, but when’ music downloads should be retired for good,” Resnikoff reports. “The sources indicated that a range of shutdown timetables are being considered by Apple, though one executive noted that ‘keeping [iTunes music downloads] running forever isn’t really on the table anymore.’ Also under discussion is a plan to ‘ride the [iTunes music download offering] out for the next 3-4 years, maybe longer,’ when paid music downloads are likely to be an afterthought in a streaming-dominated industry.”
“Lingering large is the ghost of Steve Jobs, who created a culture of aggressively phasing products out in favor of new ones, even if the older products were still earning money. That bleeding edge approach of actively cannibalizing Apple’s own products is now legendary, and the stuff of only the gutsiest companies and CEOs,” Resnikoff reports. “Within the less renegade Apple of 2016, question is whether current CEO Tim Cook is guilty of riding out the profits on a dying technology. ‘If he were alive, Jobs would have killed it,’ one source bluntly stated.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Well, after all, Jobs was famous for denouncing something right up until he embraced it.
Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it… The subscription model has failed so far. – Steve Jobs, April 2007
Never say never, indeed.
So, if you want to “own” music, instead of paying a subscription to play it, it’s back to torrenting? That doesn’t make a lot of sense now, does it? (Not that the music industry has ever really made a lot of sense of, or since the rise of, the internet.)
SEE ALSO:
Apple CEO Jobs says iTunes Store music subscriptions unlikely; says customers not into renting music – April 26, 2007
Apple needs to offer a plan for customers to upgrade their purchased songs from the current AAC lossy to Apple Lossless for a price similar to the lunes Plus upgrade offered a number of years ago.
My iTunes library includes 6,336 iTunes purchased songs that I would gladly upgrade to lossless. You are leaving money on the table, Apple.
I will not rent my music.