Most of the older Millennials and some of the pioneer Gen Z kids grew up with iTunes. Good riddance to a growing nuisance, it seems, but much of the sadness people felt for iTunes’ passing was borne from nostalgia and not necessarily a lamentation of the waste of a good app. Sure, iTunes Home Sharing tried to bridge the gap between its antiquated purpose and the growing needs of the digital native, but it was too little too late. And we haven’t even mentioned all the better iTunes alternatives out there.
It didn’t help as well that iTunes downloads saw a sharp decline over the past few years, not to mention the annoying and often redundant need for an iTunes login. Of course, at the time of its death, what was once a great music library became a confusing mess of grayed-out, inaccessible (and often unreliable) content and preference panes made by an infantile algorithm. It was a sad send-off for one of 2010’s most cherished and iconic programs (sidenote: it’s so weird calling it a ‘program’ and not an ‘app’), a music player that doubled as a media library manager way ahead of its time. So to say that iTunes is dead isn’t completely correct, as Apple simply cannibalized poor old iTunes and scattered them to the four winds. The music player-cum-podcast radio-cum-music library manager being scrapped for parts, with each aspect of the media management program receiving its own mobile app. Ok, that’s a bit melodramatic, but iTunes as we used to know it did end back in 2019. In the Fall of 2019, one of the most iconic –if not the most important –cultural touchpoint of the burgeoning digital era was ended: iTunes, once the leader in all-things music management at home, was unceremoniously killed off by Apple, a veritable infanticide by the industry giant.
If you haven’t used your laptop for listening to music in years, you’re probably wondering why your iTunes isn’t working on your Mac, and the answer is simple: iTunes is dead.
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