Apple to Discontinue iTunes LP
Apple appears to be finally pulling the plug on its iTunes LP format this year. For music sold in the iTunes Store, iTunes LP has served as a useful but not popular digital solution for including a rich multimedia experience with digital music.
Like physical records and CDs, iTunes LP content can include lyrics, photos, and liner notes as well as access to video — but the format has never been optimized for iPhone and iPad. The special iTunes format has been around for almost ten years but only around 400 albums have used it.
I’m not quite sure whether iTunes LP was a bad idea or simply one that neither Apple (aside from Steve Jobs?) nor the music producers actually had much interest in. How else to explain that Apple never brought it to iPad?
But, these days, those extras don’t require a specific packaged format. Videos are streamed for the one or two times most people watch them, and lyrics are just a scroll away for many Apple Music tracks. The world moved beyond iTunes LP. And the remaining things it offered — like exquisite artwork on gorgeous poet, and that sense of a packaged product — simply can’t be replicated effectively on a screen.
Previously: Eliminating iTunes Store Music Downloads, No iTunes Extras on Apple TV or iOS.
Update (2018-03-08): Ruffin Bailey:
I think this signals less “whether iTunes LP was a bad idea” (though the skeuomorphism Jobs loved is slowly dying our from the ’OSes) than “someone’s paying attention to scaling down iTunes”. I think they’re slowly moving towards killing music sales, no matter what Sellers at AWT thinks. ;^D
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