This Day, That Year – April 28

This day in history we feature the iTunes Store. The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. was launched on this day in 2003.

Trivia – iTunes Store

Steve Jobs saw the opportunity to open a digital marketplace for music due to the rising popularity of easily downloadable tracks. iTunes Store gave users the ability to purchase and download music from the Internet directly to their iTunes library; in 2010 the store sold its 10 billionth song. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,000 TV shows, and 65,000 films. When it opened, it was the only legal digital catalog of music to offer songs from all five major record labels.

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The iTunes Store is available on most Apple devices, including the Mac (inside the Music app), the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod touch, and the Apple TV, as well as on Windows (inside iTunes). Video purchases from the iTunes Store are viewable on the Apple TV app on Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices and certain smart televisions. While initially a dominant player in digital media, by the mid-2010s, streaming media services were generating more revenue than the buy-to-own model used by the iTunes Store. Apple now operates its own subscription-based streaming music service, Apple Music, alongside the iTunes Store. In 2011 Apple introduced iCloud, a cloud computing service, in which music recently purchased in iTunes on one device would be placed automatically in iTunes on a user’s other devices. Apple also announced iTunes Match, a service in which users could pay to store their music libraries in iCloud and listen to them on any device. Unlike other cloud computing music services, iTunes Match would construct a user’s iCloud library from songs already in the iTunes Store, and thus the user would upload only those songs not available in the iTunes Store.

Source – Wikipedia