Users interested only in iTunes' media management features-people with terabytes of MP3s who want a solid app to catalog and organize their libraries-feel abandoned as Apple moves away from local file storage in favor of cloud-based services.
Most of iTunes' latest enhancements exist solely to promote the recommendation-driven Apple Music, app downloads, and iCloud. But with its recent shift toward streaming media, Apple risks losing its most music-obsessed users: the collectors. By 2008, Apple was the biggest music vendor in the US. The iTunes store provided an easy way of finding and buying music, and iTunes provided an elegant way of managing it. At the start of the millennium, Apple famously set out to upend the music business by dragging it into the digital realm.
