How Apple's New Product Announcements Affect The Music World

Another Apple special event spectacular has come and gone, and once again people are buzzing with what was announced and what wasn’t. Apple is clearly a consumer electronics company, but one that’s highly influential in the music world, and this series of products will influence music more than you might think.

The first significant announcement was pretty much glossed over, and that’s the fact that iTunes Radio now has 20 million users and has served up over a billion songs. Considering that it’s only been a little over a month since the service was introduced (and only in the US at that), and you can see why iTunes Radio is shaping up to be the monster that Pandora and Spotify feared the most. The prediction here is that by this time next year iTunes Radio will have surpassed the cumulative listeners of both Pandora and Spotify together, and you can be sure that will jeopardize the existence of at least one of these services.

But this was an event centered mainly around hardware, and while the brand new iPads are nice and more powerful than ever, most music production is still done on desktop machines and to a lessor degree, laptops that have become almost as powerful. The new Mac Pro (which will finally be shipping in December) touted at the event will have a deeper impact than most analysts believe, basically because it’s more of a strategic product than almost anything else in the Apple line.

To understand why that is, you have to first understand that Apple rules professional audio and has for some time. There’s plenty of great audio products for the PC, but virtually all pro shops are based around the Mac hardware platform and operating system. This has been the case for more than a decade, despite the higher initial purchase price of the hardware. Read more on Forbes.

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