GoKawiilIt's been just over a quarter of a century since Steve Jobs announced the release of iTunes, and it's still treading water today, in a drastically diminished state. For the Apple faithful, iTunes holds legendary status as the once-predominant digital storefront for organizing and playing music files. At the peak of iTunes' heyday, it held roughly 63% of the US paid digital download market. Ironically, the emergence of subscription services (Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) kick-started iTunes' fall from grace. It certainly didn't help that iTunes slowly grew into a severely bloated, overly complicated amalgamation of necessary tools buried in a tab-heavy interface.
iTunes didn't necessarily disappear so much as scatter, with various remnants dispersing into separate apps. Music went to the Music app, movies to Apple TV, and podcasts to Apple Podcasts. More importantly, device syncing no longer takes place within the twisted webwork of pre-Mojave iTunes. If you connect an iPad or iPhone to your Mac to back up or restore, the process takes place in Finder, not iTunes.
The original iTunes was designed to manage a personal media collection, a task it was very good at. In time, it became Apple's behemoth hub for apps, backups, movies, podcasts, books and everything else you can imagine within the Apple ecosystem. Though it's now fragmented, iTunes is still hanging on in a few ancillary ways.