iTunes revolutionized the way people purchased and managed music in the early 2000s, but almost a decade after its introduction, the market began to change once again. Except this time, Apple wasn't leading the revolution. Instead, it was a Swedish company called Spotify who helped usher in the music streaming era.

They brought their service to the US in 2011 and as you can see from this graph, iTunes music sales began to decline just two years later. It turned out users were comfortable renting music for a monthly fee since it came with incredible advantages. Like the convenience of listening to any song in the service's catalog from any device, without taking up any storage space.

And as Spotify exploded in popularity, Apple knew they needed to offer a music streaming service of their own. But this left many people to speculate how exactly Apple would implement their service. Many assumed the company would give it a dedicated app separate from iTunes. But similar to the iPhone syncing scenario, Apple decided to squeeze their entire music streaming service into an already over-stuffed iTunes.

On the desktop, Apple decided against building a stand-alone app and instead shoved Apple Music into iTunes — it's less than stellar. Nobody likes using iTunes for the last 15 years it has been a necessary evil if you wanted to have music locally stored in halfway decent fashion on your computer, and now that it's integrated with Apple Music, there is no escaping iTunes.

And because of this tight integration with iTunes, users began experiencing headaches while trying to do things like downloading tracks for offline listening. Because that feature required iCloud Music Library to be turn on, and some users who did had their libraries completely ruined. Proving that Apple still hadn't solved the issues with iCloud Music Library, formerly known as iTunes Match, since its release four years earlier.

And this isn't even considering how cumbersome and slow Apple Music is largely due to it being integrated into iTunes. Singleton also touched on this in his review of the service, "Apple Music on the desktop is slow and heavy, and has more than a few times refused to stream music for me. If you want to put a song or album from Apple Music on repeat, you have to go on a scavenger hunt through the menu bar, and it may or may not work. iTunes feels like it was built for the last generation of apps."

And I think that's a major reason why many users, myself included, prefer using Spotify over Apple Music. It feels faster, more intuitive, and keeps track of music playback between my Apple products. So I can continue listening to a song on my iPhone that I started on my Mac. Something that Apple's own streaming service still doesn't do.

And this has left many users clamoring for a dedicated Apple Music app built from the ground up with an emphasis on performance and continuity between devices. Rather than a music service bogged down by the mess that iTunes has become. Today iTunes is a bloated resource hog that many users would rather avoid.

And with the popularity of music streaming at its peak, many are wondering what the future of iTunes might be. Or if it has a future at all. There are already rumors of Apple announcing the shut down of their iTunes Music Store by the end of this month, and that could give the company an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and reimagine their approach to music management.

Perhaps introducing a new Music application, or a completely revolutionized version of iTunes. But either way, I think we can all agree that Apple needs to make some drastic changes to salvage iTunes legacy.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eniTunes was once the most popular place tobrowse, buy, and listen to music.But that was about 15 years ago, and a lothas changed since then.In fact, many people today consider iTunesto be a bloated, slow, bug-infested applicationthat’s become the victim of its own success.So what exactly happened to iTunes?Well, in order to answer this question, wehave to go back to before iTunes ever existed.This is Greg with Apple Explained and if youwant to help decide which video topics I cover,make sure you’re subscribed and these votingpolls will show up in your mobile activityfeed.And don’t forget to check out our new iGeniusplush doll at appleexplained.com.Before the iTunes Music Store was around,major record labels were having a huge problemwith piracy.People were ripping music from CDs and sharingdigital song files to every corner of theglobe by using peer-to-peer file sharing applicationslike Napster.But most people weren’t pirating music becausethey were criminals, they were pirating musicbecause there was no other way to downloaddigital song files in those days.There was no digital music marketplace.If you wanted the latest single from Eminemor Beyonce, you’d have to make a trip toyour local record store and spend fifteenor twenty dollars to buy the entire album.Even if that single was the only song youwanted.So you can imagine the appeal of hopping onNapster and downloading individual songs forfree from the comfort of your own home, evenif it was technically illegal.And because things like the internet and theiPod grew in popularity so quickly, so diddigital music piracy, and it caught recordlabels off guard.Their initial approach to combat piracy wasto make examples out of the worst file-sharers.They did this by taking legal action and threateningthe same treatment to any other pirate.But this warning fell on deaf ears since itjust wasn’t possible to prosecute hundredsof thousands of Napster users.So then they got another idea, what if musiccould be copy-protected so that it wouldn’tbe possible to rip CDs in the first place?But before the music industry could followthrough with that plan, they were approachedby Steve Jobs, who introduced a completelynew way to combat music piracy.The concept was that you can’t stop peoplefrom pirating music, but you can discourageit by offering an easier, more convenientway to find and download digital music ata reasonable price.And looking back, this approach seemed obvious,but it was actually pretty radical.And initially, many record label executivesrefused to cooperate, since they believedApple would be the only company benefittingfrom the deal.Labels were afraid of losing even more oftheir dwindling revenue by selling songs individuallyfor ninety-nine cents, rather than sellingalbums for fifteen or twenty dollars.So to help persuade record labels to givethe iTunes Music Store a chance, Apple madeit available only on the Mac.That way the concept could be tested witha smaller audience and would cause very littledamage to the music industry if it failed.But as we all know, that wasn’t the caseat all.When the iTunes Music Store launched, it wasan instant success, selling one million musicdownloads in its first week, despite onlybeing available to Mac users.Five months later Apple would release a Windowsversion of the iTunes Store, which led tothe company’s domination of the digitalmusic marketplace.And despite drawbacks of iTunes, like purchasedsongs only being compatible with Apple devices,it proved to be the biggest player in digitalmusic sales year after year.But this is when things started to take aturn for the worst.As iTunes grew in popularity, it adopted newfeatures and functionality that contributedto the application becoming bloated.Because what started as a music jukebox anddigital music marketplace, eventually becamean iPod management program, a podcasting client,a video and software marketplace, an iPhoneadministration tool, a social network, anda music streaming service, all rolled intoone.There were many people who warned Apple thatgiving iTunes too much functionality couldresult in a complex and convoluted application,but their words were ignored.For example, just a few days before the originaliPhone was introduced in 2007, Pete Mortensenwith Wired published an article predictingApple would create an application for thesole purpose of handling data transfers betweenthe upcoming iPhone and a computer.Because remember, back in those days, youcouldn’t simply set up an iPhone on itsown.You had to activate it by connecting to acomputer with iTunes and sync all your databetween the two through a USB cable.And Mortensen figured Apple would create adedicated application to handle the syncingprocess, kind’ve like what iCloud does today,except on your computer instead of a remoteserver.Mortensen said, “Imagine a single, lightweightapplication focused solely on data transfersand media previews.As you initiate a sync, it detects all thenew data on your phone and launches transfer-onlyversions of the iLife apps needed to workwith them.All your podcasts get instantly loaded.Your photos are imported, sorted and postedto your website.Just hit OK and watch it go.”But that wasn’t what Apple had in mind.Instead, they gave iTunes the responsibilityof syncing data, and this resulted in an endlessamount of bugs and complications that plaguedthe iTunes syncing process for years.Here are just a few examples, iTunes gettingstuck on the “Waiting for items to copy”step, iTunes not syncing album art correctly,iTunes wifi sync not working for iOS users,iTunes 12 crashing while syncing apps, iTunesthinking that a device’s storage is fullwhen it really isn’t, and a host of unknownerror messages that were notoriously difficultto solve.And matters were only made worse in 2010 whenApple decided the iPad should also sync withiTunes.At that point, iTunes was responsible forsyncing contacts, calendar events, Safaribookmarks, notes, email accounts, iWork documents,music, tv shows, movies, podcasts, books,ringtones, photos, and more.Keep in mind, this functionality was on topof everything iTunes had already been responsiblefor, and the bloat showed no signs of slowingdown.Shortly after the additional iPad support,Apple introduced a new layer to iTunes calledPing.Now you may not be familiar with Ping sinceit only lasted two years, but it was a music-orientedsocial networking service intended to helpusers share and discover new music with friends.But it faced difficulties from day one.Apple hadn’t received permission to includeFacebook integration despite that being oneof its headlining features, spam links werea persistent issue since Apple didn’t setup any content filters, and fake artist accountswere created by scammers to bait users.So in short, Ping was a complete failure.And thankfully was removed from iTunes in2012.But Ping proved just how unrestrained Applewas in loading up iTunes with even more featuresrather than offering a faster, simpler, moremanageable application.Now by 2011 users finally received a synchronizationservice from Apple that worked as advertised,and it was called iCloud.I’m sure you’ve heard of it, since it’sthe most successful cloud-based service Applehas ever offered.But iCloud suffered from technical issuesthanks to a feature called iTunes Match, laterrenamed iCloud Music Library.You see, the feature was supposed to scana users iTunes music library, including trackscopied from CDs, and match them to higherquality lossless tracks in the iTunes Store.Then it would upload all those tracks to iCloudso the user could access their music libraryfrom any device.It sounded great in theory, but caused absolutehavoc when people started using iTunes Matchfor themselves.Here’s one users experience from a CultOf Mac article by Rob LeFebvre, “Discussionsuser Tuff Ghost explains that everything wasfine with his 13,000 song iTunes library,until he installed iTunes 12.2 on his Macand allowed it to enable iCloud Music Library.“All of the sudden it starts overwritingmy album art with completely wrong art (example:Weezer showed art for a Radiohead album) onboth my iMac AND my iPhone, screwing up metadataby putting random songs in albums where theydidn’t belong (there was a Cursive albumwhere the first track was listed as a FooFighters song).”When he clicked to listen to a song, it wouldplay a completely different one, like themetadata for the files was completely incorrect.”This left many people struggling to recovertheir original iTunes libraries and advisingothers to never enable iCloud Music Libraryin the first place.In the early 2000’s iTunes revolutionizedthe way people purchased and managed music,but almost a decade after its introduction,the market began to change once again.Except this time, Apple wasn’t leading therevolution.Instead, it was a Swedish company called Spotifywho helped usher in the music streaming era.They brought their service to the US in 2011and as you can see from this graph, iTunesmusic sales began to decline just two yearslater.It turned out users were comfortable rentingmusic for a monthly fee since it came withincredible advantages.Like the convenience of listening to any songin the service’s catalog from any device,without taking up any storage space.And as Spotify exploded in popularity, Appleknew they needed to offer a music streamingservice of their own.But this left many people to speculate howexactly Apple would implement their service.Many assumed the company would give it a dedicatedapp separate from iTunes.But similar to the iPhone syncing scenario,Apple decided to squeeze their entire musicstreaming service into an already overstuffediTunes.Here’s what Micah Singleton with The Vergehad to say about it in 2015, “On the desktop,Apple decided against building a stand-aloneapp and instead shoved Apple Music into iTunes— it’s less than stellar.Nobody likes using iTunes.For the last 15 years iTunes has been a necessaryevil if you wanted to have music locally storedin halfway decent fashion on your computer,and now that it’s integrated with AppleMusic, there is no escaping iTunes.”And because of this tight integration withiTunes, users began experiencing headacheswhile trying to do things like downloadingtracks for offline listening.Because that feature required iCloud MusicLibrary to be turn on, and some users whodid had their libraries completely ruined.Proving that Apple still hadn’t solved theissues with iCloud Music Library, formerlyknown as iTunes Match, since its release fouryears earlier.And this isn’t even considering how cumbersomeand slow Apple Music is largely due to itbeing integrated into iTunes.Singleton also touched on this in his reviewof the service, “Apple Music on the desktopis slow and heavy, and has more than a fewtimes refused to stream music for me.If you want to put a song or album from AppleMusic on repeat, you have to go on a scavengerhunt through the menu bar, and it may or maynot work.iTunes feels like it was built for the lastgeneration of apps.Spotify’s desktop app is nothing to writehome about, but it feels much snappier andlighter than iTunes ever has.”And I think that’s a major reason why manyusers, myself included, prefer using Spotifyover Apple Music.It feels faster, more intuitive, and keepstrack of music playback between my Apple products.So I can continue listening to a song on myiPhone that I started on my Mac.Something that Apple’s own streaming servicestill doesn’t do.And this has left many users clamoring fora dedicated Apple Music app built from theground up with an emphasis on performanceand continuity between devices.Rather than a music service bogged down bythe mess that iTunes has become.Today iTunes is a bloated resource hog thatmany users would rather avoid.And with the popularity of music streamingat its peak, many are wondering what the futureof iTunes might be.Or if it has a future at all.There are already rumors of Apple announcingthe shut down of their iTunes Music Storeby the end of this month, and that could givethe company an opportunity to go back to thedrawing board and reimagine their approachto music management.Perhaps introducing a new Music application,or a completely revolutionized version ofiTunes.But either way, I think we can all agree thatApple needs to make some drastic changes tosalvage iTunes legacy.Now if you want to a behind the scenes lookat what happens on this channel, check outthe Patreon page where you can ask me questionsand chat with the community.And don’t forget about our awesome new iGeniusplush doll available at appleexplained.com.Thanks for watching and I’ll see you nexttime.\n"