iTunes LP

» see apple.com/itunes/lp-and-extras as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i used itunes around 2009 to 2012 mainly to sync an ipod nano and to manage mp3s i already owned. i did not buy a single album in the itunes lp format. the lp was apple's pitch at making a digital download feel like a packaged record, a wrapper that carried lyrics, liner notes, a few videos, and some stylized album art alongside the audio. it landed on september 9 2009 at the same fall event where apple announced the itunes 9 update and the redesigned nano with a camera.

the technical shape was a.itlp file, which was actually a webarchive bundle. inside was html, css, javascript, css animations, and a plist manifest. the framework underneath was called tunekit. honestly the entire format was a small web app stuffed into the itunes window, the same engine apple also used to render itunes extras for movie purchases. you doubleclicked the album in your library and the lp opened in a slightly different view than a normal track listing.

the rollout albums included norah jones, dave matthews band, the doors, and a few major reissues that the major labels had agreed to repackage. pink's deluxe edition of greatest hits so far won the inaugural mtv best itunes lp award at the 2011 o music awards, which is the only award the category ever produced. by then the streaming services were already eating the album as a unit. the lp format kept shipping for a few more years on momentum more than demand.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

the goal was to recover the part of the cd era where the booklet mattered. you used to open a cd and find a twenty-page insert with photographs and lyrics. the mp3 had stripped that part out by 2003. apple's bet was that customers would pay a small premium for an album that brought the booklet back as an interactive layer. labels priced lp editions at around two to three dollars over the standard album.

~ the day it died ~

apple shipped itunes 12.7 on september 12 2017. the release pulled the app store and the ringtone store out of itunes, and as a much quieter side effect, removed the runtime that played itunes lp files. existing purchases stopped opening. anyway, apple kept submissions open for another six months as a courtesy to labels that had already produced lp wrappers for upcoming releases. the actual submission door closed march 2018. nothing took its place.

~ what got buried with it ~

itunes lp was apple's last serious attempt to make the album feel like an object. apple music connect, the artist-page feature that arrived in 2015 and died in 2019, was a thinner echo of the same idea. honestly the streaming era resolved the question by not answering it, the booklet did not come back at any service. spotify and apple music both ship credits in plain text and lyrics in a separate panel. the wrapper itself, as a category, is gone.

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