Apple Says It Has No Plans to End Music Download Sales
Posted on May 15, 2016
Apple says it has no plans to end its popular iTunes service. The tech giant also plans to continue selling music downloads. This will come as a relief to those concerned Apple was planning on dumping downloads in favor of its Apple Music subscription service.
A report in Digital Music News triggered the concerns. The article says Apple will terminate music downloads within two years. The story says, "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."
This sounds ominous but Re/code says Apple rep Tom Neumayr says the report is not true. Re/code also shows an RIAA chart that shows sales of permanent downloads are slowing while streaming revenues are climbing. However, download sales are still a healthy percentage of music revenues. If that number shrinks to 20% or small then you might start getting concerned the big companies might decide to end sales via downloads of individual tracks. Until then download sales continue to be well worth it for both music publishers and retailers.
The Digital Music News story also shows a chart that indicates iTunes song downloads are slipping. There are projected to still be nearly 800 million song downloads from iTunes in 2019. It is hard to see Apple abandoning all that revenue in hopes consumers would rapidly switch over to Apple Music.
Update:: As CNBC reports, Apple did shut down iTunes with user's libraries transferring to the Apple Music app. An Apple support page explains what happened to iTunes.