As Apple celebrates 10 years of its streaming music service, Austin Carr says it’s worth taking a look back at how it came to replace the iTunes marketplace and what that story might mean for the future of the App Store. Plus: Climate change is shaking up the olive oil industry, and Dubai chocolate is just the beginning for pistachio lovers.

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Ten years ago today, at a splashy event featuring Drake and The Weeknd, Apple Inc. introduced its subscription-based music streaming app. Apple Music was a huge deal, a preview of Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook’s push into subscription services and a sign of how aggressively Apple was willing to take on Spotify Technology SA to reclaim its dominance over consumer listening habits.

A decade later, Apple Music serves a stark reminder of why the iPhone maker is so intent on maintaining control over digital distribution on its platforms. Before rising competition and changing business models forced Cook to roll out Apple Music, its predecessor, the iTunes Store, was the only game in iTown, enabling the company to take lucrative cuts on every song and album purchase and imbuing the brand with an unprecedented cultural relevance. Now, with its equivalent software marketplace facing intense scrutiny and new rivals, it’s possible the App Store may suffer a similar fate as iTunes.

With today’s music consumption split across Amazon, Spotify, YouTube and a slew of other content services, it’s hard to remember just how influential Apple was in the music industry. Steve Jobs’ early 2000s success with the iPod offered salvation for Napster-hating record labels, reestablished Apple in mobile hardware and transformed it into a tastemaker. The iTunes Music Store, launched in 2003, made song purchases fast and easy, with each one costing about 99¢, of which Apple kept an estimated 27¢ to 37¢.

Jobs introduces the iTunes Music Store to parts of Europe at a June 2004 event in London. Photographer: Ian Waldie/Getty Images

Apple was soon selling millions and then billions of songs through iTunes, and Jobs sought to ensure rival music stores had difficulty accessing his iPod customers. While iTunes gave Apple a flowing river of nickels and dimes, it also drove sales of higher-margin hardware, letting Jobs further control the end-to-end product experience and providing Apple with years of iconic marketing campaigns. The iTunes store, which offered audiobooks, movies and TV shows as well, became a giant retail hub on Macs and Windows PCs.

Eventually, the influence of iTunes waned. The growth of the iPhone largely depended on the growth of third-party apps on its operating system—Google Maps, Netflix, etc.—even if Apple already had or subsequently introduced competing equivalents. Spotify subscriptions caught on in the 2010s, and consumer preferences soon shifted from à la carte to all-you-can-eat consumption. For $9.99 a month in the US, Spotify users gained virtually unlimited access to tens of millions of songs. Cook followed suit with Apple Music in 2015.

At first, Apple tried to save iTunes by merging the song subscription and download experiences, but users found that confusing. A few years later, iTunes was discontinued on the Mac as a standalone app and effectively became a mere tab within a desktop version of Apple Music. Today, if you open the iTunes Store app on your iPhone, you’ll still find ways to purchase individual songs, but the storefront is filled with promotions for Apple Music. If you click on the buttons for movies or TV shows, they will redirect you to the Apple TV app.

Apple Music eventually grew popular thanks to the company’s continued device and marketing reach. But streaming music is generally considered a less profitable business than one-off album sales, and Apple Music remains behind Spotify in market share (and arguably less culturally influential than other music-adjacent apps such as TikTok). More significant, the decline of the iTunes Store resulted in a huge loss of ecosystem control for Apple. As a Spotify and YouTube addict myself, it’s remarkable how little I associate music with Apple these days, despite living for well over a decade in a world of iPods and iTunes and white-wired earbuds.

A similar dynamic is playing out with Apple’s App Store, the seeds of which were planted in the iTunes era. The comparison isn’t perfect, but cracks are showing in Apple’s once-impenetrable system for taking up to a 30% cut on software sales, just as they did before with song sales. Similar to how musicians found new distribution channels for their songs, developers are exploring new distribution avenues for their apps. Rival marketplaces are emerging with different business models, and artificial intelligence services are reshaping the very notion of how users can interact with apps.

Unless Apple figures out how to adapt, the App Store risks an iTunes-like future. I, for one, opened the still-existing iTunes music player on my Windows PC for the first time in forever while writing this newsletter, and it felt like being transported back to the days of Yahoo and Internet Explorer. My music library is filled with nearly 1,000 forgotten songs, which likely cost me nearly $1,000 over the years through iTunes.

But looking back at my receipts, I see that in the past seven years, I’ve spent exactly zero dollars on songs through Apple. It’s probably high time I delete its music apps.

In Brief

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune is rushing to meet President Donald Trump’s July 4 deadline for pushing through his massive tax and spending bill.
• Canada has withdrawn its digital services tax on technology companies to restart trade talks with the US.
• President Donald Trump is championing a revival of American fossil fuels. But in Houston, a pullback in the industry has already left its mark.

Olive Oil and Climate Shocks

An olive grower in Greece. Photographer: Myrto Papadopoulos for Bloomberg Businessweek

Last December, at the height of Greece’s olive harvest season, two men drove a stolen white truck to the Glyfada mill in a small town not far from Kalamata. After idling the truck for a while, the men stepped out of the cab, loaded 33 sacks of olives into the back of the truck, then drove to a field. They transferred their haul, worth about €1,500 (a bit more than $1,700), into different bags—presumably attempting to conceal its provenance—then dropped off the truck back at the municipal office where they’d pinched it. Unfortunately for them, they’d parked their ill-gotten getaway vehicle directly in front of the mill’s security camera, which made them easy to track. Also, they brought their bags to a second mill nearby and asked the owner to press the stolen olives into oil. Suspicious, he called the authorities, and that was that.

The whole thing had an air of slapstick about it. Who thinks they can get away with such buffoonery in a small town, where news travels fast? Stealing olives, of all things? But the theft was on trend. Rising temperatures in the Mediterranean had rendered olive oil scarcer than it had been in recent memory, leaving some of the growing region’s residents desperate enough that such a crime started to make sense.

Olives have been a hardy staple for thousands of years throughout the Mediterranean because the trees thrive in dry climates. But these days olive growers in Spain, Italy and Greece—the world’s top three producers—are struggling to keep their groves from getting too dry. Greece is a leading indicator: The smallest and poorest of the three countries, it’s focused on catering to buyers of high-quality extra-virgin oil and exports more than $1 billion worth of oil a year.

Lauren Markham writes about how climate change has made the harvest much less predictable—and growing regions more desperate: The Olive Oil Crisis

The Nut of the Moment

Photo illustration: Ryan Haskins for Bloomberg Businessweek; photos: Getty

The homemade Rice Krispies Treats in Alex George’s TikTok post were no average baked good. Swirled into the cereal along with melted-down marshmallows was a healthy dollop of pistachio cream, a spread made of the nuts and lots of sugar. The chartreuse-colored confection, topped with chopped pistachios and chunks of halvah, won the attention of George’s 437,500 followers: Her video has racked up more than 53,000 views since she posted it in February.

“It was beautiful, because pistachios have a beautiful color,” says George, a self-taught baker in Philadelphia who shares her creations under the handle @lilypcrumbs. “Now that we live in this world where everything needs to look a certain way, I think sometimes you even make cooking decisions with your eyeballs before you even think about the taste.”

Thanks in part to that powerful visual appeal, pistachios in all forms are having a moment. A year and a half after Fix Dessert Chocolatier, a chocolate shop in the United Arab Emirates, introduced Dubai chocolate—a bar stuffed with gooey pistachio cream that went megaviral and inspired countless global imitators—the nuts are all over social media and restaurant menus, popping up not only in candy but also in pastries, espresso drinks, pastas and more. Data from Yelp Inc. show a surge in interest from diners in the past year: Searches for the term “pistachio” more than doubled from June 2024 to May 2025, compared to the same period a year prior, while “pistachio latte” was up 128%. “Pistachio chocolate” increased 8,942%.

Demand for the nuts have driven up margins for farmers, who are preparing for a bumper crop this fall. In our latest Going Viral story, Ilena Peng and Sunny Kim write about the trend: Pistachios Are Everywhere Right Now, Not Just in Dubai Chocolate

Electronic Warfare

Influence in the White House

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