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A First Look At Apple’s New iPad And What It Doesn’t Mean For Music …Yet

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."

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7 Comments

  1. I just posted the roughly the same thing on my blog yesterday.
    The iPad won’t have a big impact on music distribution because it’s essentially an ebook reader.
    Let’s not make something out of it that it’s not.
    This could change if any of the media bundles that will replace the album takes off though.

  2. it won’t affect music distribution.
    but wait until someone writes a decent MIDI controller app that lets it sync up to Ableton on your laptop, or control your MPC2000, or even play a DJ set off it. bing! live music tool…

  3. Give it a few more generations to really be a great machine… I agree that it would be a fantastically useful tool for traveling musicians. They can easily access their social media sites and, thus, their fans. And now that it is so easy to get free music, fans want access.
    …just another reason why video is going to skyrocket as a promotional medium, and another example of how we as music industry professionals can capitalize on the changing technology industry.
    Thanks for the post, Bruce!

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