Digital Music News in 2018: ‘Apple Is Shutting Down iTunes Music Downloads on March 31st, 2019’ ⇥ digitalmusicnews.com

Paul Resnikoff, Digital Music News:

Apple is now experiencing meteoric growth on its streaming music platform, Apple Music. But that growth is directly impacting Apple’s old-line downloads store, for obvious reasons. And, ultimately hastening its demise.

Just last week, Apple executive Jimmy Iovine pointed to a shutdown when ‘people stop buying’. Now, sources inside the company are pointing to a firm date for a planned shutdown of the iTunes music download store. Earlier, these same sources pointed to an ‘early 2019’ shutdown, though internal roadmaps now include a March 31st, 2019 phase-out of the service.

It is the last week of May and you can still buy music on iTunes. Shocking that this rumour didn’t pan out, I know.

I mention this not to be a jerk to Resnikoff, but because screenshots leaked to Guilherme Rambo at 9to5Mac show a Music app that, with the little bit shown, does not have a visible section for purchasing, which reminded me of this rumour. Maybe the iTunes Store will be more fully integrated within Music, so an option to buy music could appear next to the option to add it to your library; or, perhaps iTunes Store purchases are relegated to the iTunes app and it is, indeed, slowly phased out. That would be a shame for me because I am one of those weird people who likes to buy music; also, I really don’t like DRM.

But, so far, there’s little to indicate that the iTunes Store is dead, even though March came and went.