Technology giant Apple on Monday confirmed recent speculation from key players in the industry that it was going to scrap its historic iTunes service.
ADVERTISEMENTTechnology giant Apple on Monday confirmed recent speculation from key players in the industry that it was going to scrap its historic iTunes service.
Demand for the music store, which has been available for almost two decades on the brand's devices, has been replaced by streaming services, including Apple Music.
The news broke as the company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California kicked off.
iTunes is set to be replaced with an app dubbed Music on the new version of MacOS, CEO Tim Cook and other company executives announced.
"Customers love iTunes and everything it can do. But if there's one thing we hear over and over, it's 'Can iTunes do even more?'" said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.
In the suite of rollouts, a new Podcast and Apple TV app with updated features will also be made available.
The likes of Bloomberg speculated prior to the announcement that the firm would launch a trio of new apps for the Mac – Music, TV, and Podcasts – to replace iTunes.
Keen-eyed Reddit users noticed spotted the fact that posts on the iTunes Instagram and Facebook accounts had been deleted before the news was made official.
The iTunes store has over 50 million songs as well as TV shows and films for sale.
A subscription to Apple Music currently allows users to access songs they bought from iTunes — it is thought the company will take steps for users to manage downloaded content via this app.
Apple also demonstrated its next-generation mobile software iOS 13 at the WWDC, which had new features including improved Siri functionality, as well as a new Mac Pro.
Euronews contacted Apple for comment but had not received a response at the time of writing.