iTunes, digital media player application created by Apple in 2001. iTunes was at the forefront of the digital music revolution, providing a free, user-friendly means to play and organize digital music and video files. iTunes was developed as a complete work, with nonstandard interfaces that are independent of the host operating system (OS), inverting the typical hardware/OS/application relationship.
Songs stored on iTunes can be organized across a range of detailed information, allowing the user to search under a variety of headings, including artist, album, song, or genre. It also contains functions that allow the user to create various playlists, create CDs, or listen to songs most recently added to the user’s library. Additionally, iTunes plays streaming audio from the Internet, connecting listeners to radio stations around the world.
Compatible with both Mac and PC systems, iTunes is an interface to manage Apple Inc.’s popular iPod (MP3 player) and iPhone. Since its beginnings as a digital music library, iTunes has developed many additional features. For instance, in 2003 Apple launched the iTunes Store, which gave users the ability to purchase and download music from the Internet directly to their iTunes library. Within four years the store had sold more than 3 billion songs, and three years after that (in early 2010) it sold its 10 billionth song. In addition to music, the iTunes Store also offers music videos, television shows, electronic games, podcasts (broadcasts transmitted by and through iPods), and feature-length films for download.
For many years Apple had resisted pressure from various record publishers to abandon the company’s single price point of $0.99 per song. In April 2009 Apple gave in and began selling some songs, typically new releases by established artists, for a premium price. At the same time, Apple stopped the restrictive practice of including digital rights management (DRM) software in songs downloaded from the iTunes Store. This enabled customers to move purchased songs to any equipment or player that supports Apple’s AAC encoding format.
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.