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fliptop writes:

Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader and sociology professor and director of the Center for Theory at the University of Texas at Arlington David Arditi recently speculated on the implications of Apple's announcement that Itunes will be shut down:

During its Worldwide Developers Conference this week in San Jose, California, Apple announced iTunes will no longer exist as a digital jukebox but will be reformed into three separate apps for music, television and podcasts. While the change has been a long time coming — sales of digital music downloads have dropped for six straight years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — it marks a significant shift in the company's business model and in the kind of consumer behavior that Apple helped shape when it first opened the digital store in 2001. Music lovers were no longer bound to the full purchase of an album that was packaged and sold by a record label; they were free to buy single songs for 99 cents, which ushered in a new era of pick-and-choose consumption.

[...] Apple will continue to sell downloadable music through its iTunes store (located in its Apple Music app), but the repackaging of apps is a recognition that consumers are streaming content more than buying it. Music will be on one app, TV on another, and podcasts on another.

The professors aren't so sure that's a winning strategy. They described themselves as typical consumers who want all their content in one place.

"[Apple was] getting a lot of reports that people thought that iTunes was really clunky, so they wanted to find this way to streamline it, which was to break it into different apps, which seems kind of counterintuitive," Arditi said. "Now, instead of having one app for all these different things, you're going to have three, four, five apps to access different types of media."

Added Fader: "I had the same initial reaction, which is, 'This is not streamlining.'"

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

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