WhereIsAtlas · iTunes
What Happened to iTunes?
The store that changed how the world buys music — retired by Apple and split into new apps.
iTunes was Apple's digital music store, player and media manager, and for years the most influential way to buy music online. Apple retired the iTunes brand in 2019, splitting it into Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Podcasts.
The store that broke the record industry
ITunes launched in 2001 as Apple's music player, but it became something far bigger — the digital store that made buying music online the mainstream. At 99 cents a song, it gave people a legal, convenient alternative to piracy and changed the money math of the music industry.
The heart of Apple's media empire
For nearly two decades, iTunes was Apple's central media application. It managed music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and iPods/iPhones, and its library and syncing model defined how people organised their digital lives. At its peak, the iTunes Store was the world's largest music retailer.
The retirement
By the late 2010s, iTunes had become a sprawling, bloated app trying to do too much. In 2019 Apple retired the iTunes brand, splitting its duties across dedicated apps — Apple Music for music, Apple TV for video, Apple Podcasts for podcasts.
Where iTunes is now
The iTunes name is gone as a standalone product, but the iTunes Store lives on inside Apple's newer apps. In 2025, Apple even introduced a dedicated Windows app to replace the aging iTunes on PCs. What "iTunes" did — making buying music effortless — is now simply how the world shops for songs.
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Sources
- iTunes - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-05)
- Apple launches new Windows app to replace iTunes on PC — BTW Media (2026-09-05)