Happy Birthday, iTunes: Here's How Apple's Media App Has Changed Over 14 Years

To honor iTunes' 14th birthday, check out the changes Apple's made to it, for better or worse, throughout the years.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Fourteen years ago this week, Steve Jobs stood on the MacWorld stage and introduced the world to iTunes, the service that would revolutionize the music industry and help make the iPod one of the most popular devices ever.

When it launched, iTunes was a sleek new piece of software. It was pretty bare-bones when it first launched, but it would later change the way we consume music and fuel our transition from compact disks to digital files. It looked stylish, organized music beautifully, and was a breeze to use, all of which factored into its popularity. It'd been built with a minimalist design in mind. Menus and options were easy to understand and access. But as the software—along with Apple's hardware—evolved, more things had to come in the small package. 

Now, with competition from streaming music companies like Spotify and Pandora, iTunes has lost some of its coolness. Considering that iTunes digital music sales have fallen between 13%-14% worldwide in the last year, a lot of people are feeling the same way.

In honor of the aging program that's still alive and kicking, here are 14 of the biggest changes Apple's made to iTunes throughout the years.

iTunes Syncs With iPods

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Smart Playlists

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The iTunes Music Store

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When: April 2003

The iTunes Music Store was the most important change to iTunes in its then-brief history. First appearing in the iTunes 4 update, the store introduced a way for users to buy digital copies of their favorite music all in one place. People had been pirating content for a long time (the original Napster has only been shut down a couple of years earlier), but this was a simple and legal way to purchase songs. For $.99 a pop, it wasn't half-bad; it was a hell of a lot better than being picked out of obscurity and sued for millions by record companies.

A chart (seen above, to the right) let users see what the top selling songs were, and customers no longer had to purchase entire albums to listen to a single track.  

Party Shuffle

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Music Videos for $1.99

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Cover Flow

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When: September 2006

With the rise of digital media and CD sells plummeting, album cover art was largely getting passed over. In order to give cover art some more attention, Apple introduced Cover Flow with iTunes 7. When scrolling through selections, the cover art for the corresponding track would be displayed in a window above the songs. 

Yet this feature, too, got the ax in the iTunes 11 redesign.

Home Sharing

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Apple Updates iTunes Privacy Policy to Collect Location-Based Data on Users

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Ping Social Network

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iTunes' Security Flaw Took Apple Three Years to Fix

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iTunes 11

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iTunes Radio

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U2 In Every iTunes

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Apple Starts 14-Day Return Policy on Songs in Europe

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When: December 2014

Apple complied with the European Union's right of withdrawal rules in December, letting EU customers return digital content, like songs, within 14 days of purchasing it, without "any reason":


Right of cancellation: If you choose to cancel your order, you may do so within 14 days from when you received your receipt without giving any reason, except iTunes Gifts which cannot be refunded once you have redeemed the code.

This is a great policy that, unfortunately, isn't in place on the other side of the Atlantic. In countries like the United States, Apple can still refuse to refund a customer's purchase, and they may only give money back if there's a technical issue during a download. Google, on the other hand, lets users return a digital product within two hours of purchase. (If you're anything like me and have regretted picking up that game that looked great in the preview but only kept your attention for 10 minutes, this would definitely be a welcomed option.)

Cross your fingers for the iTunes of 2015.

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