I've read more than one eulogy this week, on prominent sites, for the ITUNES MUSIC STORE. This is a little maddening, as the iTunes Music Store has neither died nor been condemned to die. (Insert your own press criticism here; I'm doing my best to refrain.) But it's also emblematic of the general confusion around the bloated, sprawling APPLE music ecosystem, which is one of the main reasons the company had to do away with the software that used to manage all of it, which is also called ITUNES, and which is where contemporary eulogies should be directed. BILLBOARD has a good, quick explainer on the coming changes (and the coming not-changes). Basically Apple, like a magician trying to yank a tablecloth off a table without disturbing the place settings on top of it, is planning to move iTunes to trash without killing any of its features. Which leaves one crucial question for you, iTunes user: Do you believe in magic? Oh, and come this fall, when the iTunes tablecloth is officially yanked, will you remember how loudly you've been complaining about the software for the past 10 or more years? MusicSET: "Notes on the Long Anticipated, Not Quite Death of iTunes"... In a post-album, post-CD, post-download era, you can hardly blame Billboard for the accounting gymnastics it goes through to create its top-200 albums chart every week. But in his always insightful PENNY FRACTIONS newsletter, DAVID TURNER articulates one of the things that's always been frustrating about the magazine's complicated math, which treats paid streaming plays, ad-supported streaming plays and video plays as three separate things, with rapidly declining value from the former to the latter. Video plays, in fact, don't count. Turner's current newsletter examines what he calls "the central tension of the charts to either measure song popularity or how much money it produces, which over the last decade is increasingly not the same thing." Billboard, he argues, will "always privilege what makes money over sheer popularity." But what gets lost when listeners who can afford a subscription are counted more than people who are willing to put up with ads, who in turn are counted more than people who'd rather click on videos? How do the tastes of those listeners differ? What would a flat chart that represented every play as one play look like? How else might you chart consumption circa 2019? How will ROLLING STONE and ALPHA DELTA (formerly BUZZANGLE MUSIC) approach the question on their charts, which have already missed their public launch date? Are they still trying to figure that out?... Pop and hip-hop producer POLOW DA DON is launching a terrestrial country radio station in Nashville today that he says will be "an inclusive home to artists who may not have a platform right now." Sample artists for WYCZ, whose format Polow is calling "young country": KANE BROWN, CHRIS YOUNG, TAYLOR SWIFT, MIGOS, YELAWOLF and LIL NAS X. Hell. Yes... KELIS' 2001, NEPTUNES-produced album, WANDERLAND, which was never released in North America because of label issues, has suddenly shown up on streaming services... CARRIE UNDERWOOD was the big winner Wednesday at the CMT MUSIC AWARDS... The US Justice Department has opened a review of ASCAP's and BMI's consent decrees... Music festival TINDER.