A new report claims that Apple is going to discontinue the iTunes LP multimedia album format later this month. The report is based on an email that Apple has apparently sent to people in the music business to inform them that it’s going to pull LPs from the iTunes store. This has even sparked some speculation that the company might be thinking about killing off iTunes.
Metro claims to have seen an email that Apple has sent to people in the music business announcing the withdrawal of LPs from the iTunes Store. For those who are unaware, LP stands for “long-playing” and is generally used to refer to an album.
However, Apple doesn’t use LPs to refer to albums on iTunes. It uses it to describe a specific type of music bundle that it’s reportedly going to pull gradually from the iTunes store throughout this year.
The email was sent by the company two weeks ago and was signed by “The Apple Music Team.” The email revealed that Apple would kill off iTunes LPs, these multimedia album packages work on desktops and feature interactive artwork.
“Apple will no longer accept new submissions of iTunes LPS after March 2018,” the company said, adding that “customers who have previously purchased an album containing an iTunes LP will still be able to download the additional content using iTunes Match.”
While this certainly doesn’t mean that we’ll wake up one day and find that iTunes no longer exists, music industry sources quoted in the report predict that this is circumstantial evidence which supports recent speculation that Apple might give up on selling music downloads and completely shift to a streaming model.
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