It was prom night 2004, and Matt Garville wasn’t attending. He owned dozens of CDs that needed to be uploaded to his iTunes library.

A burgeoning music obsessive at an all-boys Catholic school in Oradell, New Jersey, Garville had been gifted an iPod for graduation. “It’s the coolest thing imaginable when it first started,” he told The Washington Post, “having like your entire CD collections digitized and being able to pick any song or album instantaneously and play it.” As his friends danced to Usher and Maroon 5 that night, he was ripping Nirvana, Blink-182 and Nine Inch Nails tracks into a meticulously organized MP3 library. Against all odds, he still uses iTunes to this day.

If Garville was at the front of a digital music revolution in high school, now he is part of a vanishing rear guard of iTunes loyalists. Apple launched its iTunes store the year before his prom and it quickly became the most popular way to legally download music. By the late 2000s, iTunes gifts cards were available at seemingly every checkout stand and Apple was earning billions selling tracks for about a dollar each. Then the streaming era came along and made downloadable music all but obsolete.

The iTunes store has largely been supplanted by Apple Music and its streaming competitors, which offer millions of songs on demand for a flat subscription fee. According to the 2025 MRI-Simmons National Consumer Study, Spotify and Apple Music have a combined 116 million monthly subscribers in America -- more than 10 times the approximately 11.1 million U.S. adults who bought music on the iTunes Store in the past month.

The holdouts have their reasons. Garville has never liked the idea of “renting music” through a streaming service. But like others, his love for iTunes is mixed with the frustrations of using a fading technology, not to mention Apple’s habit of prodding him to join the crowd and start streaming. “They’re not catering to all music fans. They’re just trying to push one model,” Garville said. “Luckily, iTunes is still working. But they’ve definitely made it more difficult and made me jump through more hoops to listen to my music the way I want to.”

Some iTunes fans dislike the overwhelming array of suggestions that clutter many streaming platforms (“New Music,” “Popular Music,” “Music for You”). Others are put off by the relatively measly payments streamers give musicians, or balk at the thought of abandoning an iTunes library they have stocked with thousands of songs over the years. For some, it’s much more simple: they’re just used to what they know.

Dan Israelson, 36, has dabbled with streaming apps: Apple Music, Rhapsody, Google Play Music, Tidal, Amazon Music. But he eventually returned to iTunes, which he has used intermittently since 2013, as his primary source for music. Intentionally purchasing albums, as opposed to streaming whatever an algorithm suggests, helps him process music more deeply.

“With the all-you-can-eat buffet that is streaming, you can endlessly discover new music and quickly rule out music that doesn’t instantly click with you,” Israelson said. He recalled his discovery of the alt-metal group Tool, which didn’t connect with him at first, but in time became his favorite band. “There’s something to be said for taking time with a specific album and really absorbing it. You may find it becomes vastly more impactful to you than something that catches you on a first quick stream.”

Latter-day iTunes users are an eclectic mix, as evidenced by an iTunes Top Songs chart that resembles the wild west of pop music. In recent days, rock, country and contemporary Christian groups have shared space on the chart with outliers like the Canadian-American 1960s group Buffalo Springfield; New Zealand indie rockers the Beths; and conservative rapper Tom MacDonald, whose track “The Devil is a Democrat” hit No. 1 on iTunes for several days without making a blip on the major Spotify or Billboard charts. Semi-siloed as it is, iTunes is not immune from the songs of the summer. It’s impossible to escape “KPop Demon Hunters” anywhere at the moment, including the iTunes top 10.

Some deride iTunes as a boomer app, not entirely unfairly. Its users tend to be older than typical streaming listeners; 81 percent of adults who bought music on iTunes in the past month were 35 and over, according to the MRI-Simmons study.

“A lot of us are just a creature of routine,” said Chris Styles, a 45-year-old DJ. With a lengthy iTunes library of club classics and party hits, Styles can easily import the tracks he downloads into his DJing software, while the iTunes Top Songs chart helps him keep up with mini-trends and fashionable oldies (Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” is especially hot right now, he said.)

As with so many iTunes users, familiarity is what keeps Styles coming back. “In DJing, the guys who were part of the transition from vinyl to CD to MP3, they’re probably still attached to iTunes,” he said. But in his spare time, he admits, he puts iTunes away and listens to Spotify.

It’s much the same for Dakota Johnson, 28, who works at a dance studio in Iowa and isn’t the “Materialists” actress. Because the studio has to edit songs down to the second, he uses iTunes to soundtrack different routines. “Once you pay for that individual file, you’re free to do with it as you please,” Johnson said. And yet outside of work, he’s subscribed to Apple Music and doesn’t personally know anyone who uses iTunes as their primary source of music.

But they do exist. Some have ethical or financial reasons for sticking with an aging iTunes. Streaming royalties are infamously minuscule; Apple Music on average pays $0.01 per stream, split between the artist, publisher and label, and a Business Insider report from 2020 found that Spotify can pay far less than that. iTunes, by contrast, takes about 30 percent of the revenue from each sale, according to widespread industry reports.

“A lot of musicians actually use iTunes because the deal is actually quite good,” said Schack Lindemann, a technology consultant at Roskilde University in Denmark.

The sound quality is nothing to sneeze at, either. While popular streaming apps often compress music files heavily to save bandwidth, standard iTunes tracks play at a relatively high bit rate of 256 kilobits per second, and lossless (CD-quality) tracks have been available on iTunes since 2011. That’s one reason Lindemann prefers to keep his collection of Brian Eno, Led Zeppelin, classical and many other tracks on iTunes, despite Apple’s aggressive promotion of Apple Music on his phone.

Nearly every iTunes user that The Post spoke to feared that the service might go offline one day, with some complaining that it’s become increasingly difficult to use the iTunes store and sync their libraries with their iPhones. The death of iTunes was prematurely reported in 2019, when Apple phased out the iTunes app and rolled the store into a generically named Music app. Forebodingly, an option in the new app lets people hide the iTunes store entirely.

Apple did not offer a comment on how long it plans to keep iTunes running. Kirk McElhearn, the former writer of MacWorld’s “Ask the iTunes Guy” column, does not think the platform is in imminent danger of going dark. He finds it hard to predict when, if ever, the streaming apps will have their final victory over iTunes.

“Apple is going to probably keep the iTunes Store alive for as long as they need to,” he said. “Removing it is an admission that a certain period is over. It still may happen at some point.”