New relationship as iTunes Store is soon becoming deprecated

Hey,

What are we suppose to do in the near future, now that Apple is going to deprecate the iTunes app and also iTunes Store?
They are already today redirecting it’s content on iTunes Store to Apple Music and the links are as follow

OLD
https://itunes.apple.com/country/album/1234567890
is redirecting to the new prefix
NEW
https://music.apple.com/country/album/1234567890

But the relationship creator in MusicBrainz does not recognize the new link with music.apple.com. Can this be updated soon so that we are adding working links for digital releases? I don’t see the meaning in adding itunes.apple.com links today when Apple is redirecting them to music.apple.com

Any thoughts about this?

4 Likes

You should be able to manually select a relationship type just fine.
But I’m not sure which to choose: “Purchase for download” or “Stream for free”
Apple Music isn’t free after all and some releases might not be available for purchase (in the future).


Related tickets:

Related thread:


More thoughts

Maybe let it have it’s own relationship type like Amazon. Or rename “Stream for free” to just “Stream”, alternatively introduce a new relationship type for non-free streams.

What about attributes? Like “free” and “purchase” for downloads, “free” and “subscription” for streams. Was this already suggested/disussed? Can’t find anything right now.

1 Like

From what I’ve heard, they’re not totally deprecating iTunes, they’re merely splitting it into four separate apps, like what they’ve already done for iPhones and iPads: Music, TV, Podcasts and the iTunes Store. (More on the last one below.)

If you actually follow one of those links, you can still access the “Also available in iTunes” clickable blurb near the bottom of the page. (This option isn’t available for every release, as I detailed in MBS-9375 and STYLE-801.)

I know there’s a lot of confusion right now about what’s going to happen with iTunes, and a lot of the media coverage it’s getting isn’t helping. Apple’s WWDC keynote is scheduled for tomorrow; we might know more details then.

1 Like

So basically the iTunes software is becoming a Music-app instead. My main question when creating this thread was not whether the software is updated or not. I just wanted to alert that MB might want to update the relationship bot so that it will recognise when we add music.apple.com-links and that it will know the relationship “available for purchase” can be automatically added.

As it is right now, we can indeed add the apple.music.com-links but we manually hade to select the correct relationship. I just want everything so work automatically, if you know what I mean. :slight_smile:

Also, I can’t see any reason for Apple to close the entire iTunes Store for purchasing music. I don’t think they will rely fully on the streaming service they have. People will still buy their music.

2 Likes

I can’t see it either. What’s not clear right now is how Apple will handle purchase-able content. At present, iOS has a separate app for the iTunes Store. I assumed based on this that there would be a desktop version in macOS Catalina; based on what’s being reported out of WWDC, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Music Store
For users who still like to own their music, the iTunes Store is just a click away.
New features available with macOS Catalina

1 Like

You ninja’d me, @Deleted_Editor_1440677 :wink:
I was about to reply with this comment from Ars Technica, which pointed out that there was a Store section shown in the screenshot of the new Music app shown at WWDC.

Does it imply that every song available in Apple Music (such as https://music.apple.com/us/album/1233641551 mentioned in iTunes change alert) will be available for download too?

I don’t think so. Not everything available on Apple Music is currently available for download on iTunes (as I mentioned in that thread and the two JIRA tickets I mentioned earlier in this thread) and I don’t expect that will change.