Yesterday's iPad announcement provided a boost for beleagured book publishers, but it offered nothing new for the music sector beyond a slightly better set of speakers. That doesn't mean, however, that things won't change.
A core tenant for Apple is interoperability between its devices as well as with iTunes. The iPad is part of that same ecosystem into which late last year Apple added the iTunes LP to feature bonus content. Imagine an album cover on the big iPad screen and flipping through the pages of a virtual booklet.
More importantly Apple is encouraging the same app developers that made the iPhone worth having to develop specifically for the iPad. So what the iPad means to music is limited only by the imagination of artists, programmers and those willing to finance them. As David Pogue wrote in the the New York Times, "Like the iPhone, the iPad is really a vessel, a tool, a 1.5-pound sack of potential. It may become many things."
