It looks like Apple is finally about to kill iTunes

“People have been complaining about iTunes for ages,” Adam Clark Estes writes for Gizmodo.The bloated and confusingly arcane piece of software has been updated and repurposed and jerry-rigged to handle new tasks for the past 18 years, and one developer says it won’t live to see its 19th birthday.”
“It looks like Apple is finally about to kill iTunes and release separate apps for music, podcasts, and books,” Estes writes. “Rest in peace, iTunes, you digital dinosaur.”
“Developer Steve Troughton-Smith recently said he’d found evidence that a new suite of media apps appeared to be in the works ahead of Apple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference in June,” Estes writes. “And quite conspicuously, it looks like the new apps do all the things that iTunes does.”

I am now fairly confident based on evidence I don't wish to make public at this point that Apple is planning new (likely UIKit) Music, Podcasts, perhaps even Books, apps for macOS, to join the new TV app. I expect the four to be the next wave of Marzipan apps. Grain of salt, etc
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) April 5, 2019

“A new Music app for macOS would handle Apple Music and any songs you actually own. A new Podcast app would handle podcasts, and a new Books app would have all your book stuff. Then the TV app would be all of your watchable stuff,” Estes writes. “And if this workflow sounds familiar, that’s because this is how this already works on iOS devices. Apple could bring that simplicity over to your Mac, and that would be beautiful.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Rest in pieces, you mean.
Regardless, this is a great idea that can’t happen soon enough!
Apple, especially under Steve Jobs, has shown a great and admirable willingness to cannibalize themselves. They obliterated their iPod business with the iPhone, for one example. But, when it comes to iTunes, they seem paralyzed by fear of change. Apple paralyzed by fear is not a pretty thing and it doesn’t yield pretty things. It yields hot messes like iTunes.
iTunes screams to be broken up into separate, streamlined apps. It’s been screaming that for years. But Apple seems to be scared silly to do so — perhaps 800+ million credit cards have something to do with it — so they’ve tinkered around the edges, making questionable tweaks here an there and bolting on even more bloat.
Grow a pair, Apple, and do what needs to be done already. — MacDailyNews Take, July 17, 2015