iTunes change alert

I went to a random iTunes page I came across recently but I am not redirected to Apple Music and I still see the old URL correctly.

  1. https://itunes.apple.com/jp/album/id1406665639
  2. https://music.apple.com/jp/album/id1406665639

They both work without redirect.
Do you know when they are going to auto redirect to the second URL?


FTR I’m asking this because currently we cannot call the itunes.apple.com/lookup search API from a music.apple.com page (CORS not declared).
And the music.apple.com/lookup URL does not exist.

I don’t know which one of the two fixes they will choose.

So my current fix is not yet OK to submit to dufferzafar:

itunes.apple.com is the new way. It seems they’ve started integrating before now. It was www.itunes.com. I use “fnd.io” to locate iTunes releases. It always brought me to www.itunes.com before. I think it might not have been an all at once thing, because I’ve noticed that some have itunes.apple.com address for their links for a while now, but mine always was www.itunes.com. With that address it had both the iTunes & Apple Music ID’s together and when you clicked “see in Apple Music” it’d bring you there and vice versa. In the script, I had to manually change the www.itunes.com in the addresses to itunes.apple.com yesterday to make it work. Yeah, it only works on itunes.apple.com, but not music.apple.com. I tried it with the second also and got no results. Most of the time they are the same ID, but it would be nice to have both urls since they are technically 2 different sites now.

1 Like

Oh sorry I misunderstood OP as I had never heard of www.itunes.com before.
I can drop my user script change above, it is useless.

My fix seems to work, but i only tested on firefox 67 on linux

I’ve never seen www.itunes.com before - it’s always been itunes.apple.com for me…

1 Like

Yeah, you’re right. It was itunes.apple.com or www.itunes.com. Seems both worked. However, as of tonight, all itunes.apple.com sites are being redirected to music.apple.com and the script no longer works. I manually went and changed all the itunes.apple.com to music.apple.com and that didn’t work. That’s about all my knowledge of scripting allows me to try. :slight_smile:

Update: The manual replacement trick I mentioned earlier no longer works. Even following a link from MB (which worked previously) results in an automatic redirect.
This means the iTunes import script no longer works (for the time being, at least) but it’s still possible to glean release dates, barcodes, cover art, etc. by digging in the page source manually.

The script has been updated and appears to be working fine for me now. Check to make sure you have the newest script. It came out last night.

4 Likes

Can you give full URL examples of artist/release/recording available on one website but not on the other?

1 Like


This single is only available on Apple Music.

iTunes release:

Apple music release:

They have the same barcode, but different Apple IDs.

Thanks! The iTunes release https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/1440738173 you gave is correctly redirected to https://music.apple.com/us/album/1440738173. So updating these URLs in the MusicBrainz database won’t be an issue, right?

Apple music release https://music.apple.com/us/album/id1077804860 you gave and https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/id1233641551 @HibiscusKazeneko gave are not available on iTunes which is going to be discontinued soon anyway, thus I guess there is no need to distinguish between IDs valid for Apple Music only and IDs valid for both iTunes and Apple Music, right?

Is it still necessary to have both URLs when these are the same IDs?
Should we still consider two different websites or just anticipate on itunes.apple.com becoming just a redirect in the near future?

That’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that the desktop app is being discontinued; what’s still up in the air is whether there will still be a way to purchase content. More on that in this thread.

Edit to avoid double-posting: It looks like Apple isn’t killing off paid downloads after all.

I haven’t been able to use the script since the change came in (Firefox on Windows with Greasemonkey).

Another iTunes/Apple Music change with the web interface now available:

The major changes I notice for the moment, old iTunes id doesn’t redirect to new Apple Music id like before. Example https://itunes.apple.com/it/album/id40060616 should redirect to https://music.apple.com/it/album/la-llorona/285102738.

Or country redirection, like https://music.apple.com/gb/album/1440902312 was redirected to https://music.apple.com/gb/album/1337713157, again this doesn’t work anymore.

For both only an empty page is available.

2 Likes

I actually have an Apple Music account and I noticed starting this morning that Apple Music is now embeded on the website and not just the app. The “Also available on iTunes” link appears to be gone. So, yes, outside of Windows software, it appears that iTunes is history. I also only got a blank page as you stated. We really need to update iTunes on MB. I asked last year for an update on the links to show an icon for Apple Music. Nothing has been done.

It’s not totally gone, at least for me. It now shows up for me as “Also available in the iTunes Store”; if I were to click on it, it opens a prompt to open the iTunes Store in the Music app. (I’m on a Mac; I can’t speak for what happens on other operating systems.)

It might be doing that because I have an Apple Music account. The music.apple.com websites actually show me logged in and I can play music, just like if I was on iTunes. Which is actually kinda cool.

1 Like

FYI, your Italy itunes link does actually bring up the release on my iTunes software, just not on the webpage. Weird.

Here’s a roundup of the pertinent JIRA tickets:




3 Likes