Happy 20th Birthday to iTunes Music Store

[Robbie]

Launched (in US): 28 April 2003

It seems as if the long time imminent demise of the iTunes Downloads Store has hidden the fact that today (28 April 2023) marks the 20th anniversary of its launch.

Apple Launches the iTunes Music Store 

CUPERTINO, California—April 28, 2003—Apple® today launched the iTunes® Music Store, a revolutionary online music store that lets customers quickly find, purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The iTunes Music Store offers groundbreaking personal use rights, including burning songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, listening to songs on an unlimited number of iPods, playing songs on up to three Macintosh® computers, and using songs in any application on the Mac®, including iPhoto™, iMovie™ and iDVD™.

“The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use and to put music on an unlimited number of iPods for on-the-go listening,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Consumers don’t want to be treated like criminals and artists don't want their valuable work stolen. The iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution for both.”

The iTunes Music Store features over 200,000 songs from music companies including BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and Warner. Users can easily search the entire music store to instantly locate any song by title, artist or album, or browse the entire collection of songs by genre, artist and album. Users can listen to a free 30-second high-quality preview of any song in the store, then purchase and download their favorite songs or complete albums in pristine digital quality with just one click.

The iTunes Music Store also features exclusive tracks from over 20 artists, including Bob Dylan, U2, Eminem, Sheryl Crow and Sting, as well as special music videos from several of these artists which users can watch for free. In addition, the iTunes Music Store highlights new releases, staff favorites and up-and-coming artists, and delivers a compelling variety of music from many genres and time periods, ranging from Rock and Hip Hop to Jazz and Classical. The ability to browse the entire music store by genre, artist and album combined with free high-quality previews of every song lets users explore music in an entirely new way, to easily find the hits they love and discover gems they’ve never heard before.

All music on the iTunes Music Store is encoded in the industry-standard AAC audio format at 128 kilobits per second which enables smaller files and faster download times while rivaling CD-quality sound superior to the quality of MP3 files at the same size. The AAC audio format, developed by Dolby, was also adopted to provide the audio encoding for the industry-standard MPEG-4 video format.
The iTunes Music Store is fully integrated into iTunes® 4, the fourth major release of Apple’s popular digital music jukebox software, allowing users to purchase, download, organize and listen to their music using just one application. iTunes 4 features major new enhancements including Rendezvous™ music-sharing between Macs, so users can legally stream their music to other Macs without the hassle of copying files from computer to computer.

www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-Music-Store/

Although much loved by the public, it seems like the actual music business never really fully embraced it before the store itself was brushed aside by streaming. It seems like a relic of a bygone era and the feeling that the iTunes Music Store represents something from the past can be found by the lack of articles about its 20th birthday. When it was 10 years old there were articles everywhere, inluding in Billboard and Music Week. This is all I can find:

Music changed forever with Apple's iTunes Music Store 20 years ago

On April 28, 2003, Steve Jobs announced the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs and a few exclusives that not only changed the record industry then, it paved the way to today's streaming.

It's unlikely that you have said or thought the word "iTunes" in at least a couple of years. Back in 2021, Apple broke up the iTunes app into separate ones for music, tv and so on, and it was right to do so because it had become peculiarly confusing.

There's much to still be confused about, too, as iTunes has been split up, but the iTunes Music Store still exists. Apple has just gone to some lengths to hide what was once such an important part of its business.

The iTunes Music Store took iTunes, the little music-playing app, and turned it into a way to discover new music — and to buy it, too. Today buying music a track at a time seems oddly antiquated, but back in 2003, it was a seismic change for both music buyers and for record labels.

appleinsider.com/articles/23/04/28/music-changed-forever-with-apples-itunes-music-store-20-years-ago

Here in the UK we had to wait over a year for the iTunes Music Store to launch, 15 June 2004 to be exact. The launch of the store in the UK tied in with the launch of the test Download Top 20 singles chart, with the first proper downloads singles chart launching in September 2004.

[Robbie]

I've had a look at my iTunes receipts and I last bought a download in September 2018. Around 2009-2014 I was often buying several downloads a week, both current chart music as well as older songs. Then I downloaded Spotify and the purchases from iTunes started to quickly dry up. I guess this is similar to what many other people did given the way download sales fell sharply around the middle of the 2010s.

[Mic1812]

i still get the odd itunes track especially if its a clean version of a song

[rewardman]

My last download was 14 April 2023.

In my time I have downloaded three albums in full and maybe a dozen individual tracks.

[Smurfie]

My last download via iTunes was 2018! And Rachel Stevens! My first was Shapeshifters.