When people talk about what the iPad’s going to be good for, most people jump to the obvious choices: It’s going to revolutionise newspapers! And magazines! (It might.) It’ll be great for watching videos! (It probably won’t.) But really, it’s the little markets, mostly untouched by the often too-small iPhone. I’m talking about comics. Drum machines. Sheet music.
It’s these little nooks that make the prospect of what amounts to a medium-sized piece of touchable glass most exciting, not the obvious – and hyperbolic – predictions about stuff that already has a digital presence. Bring on the niche, iPad devs. [ForScore]
Chris
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 10:07 AMExcept the music industry is so backwards when it comes to digital media that you’ll never see sheet music being released digitally. They have enough problems with people sharing badly transcribed guitar tabs, and even lyrics, that I could never see this happening.
RK
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 10:35 AMWell…
First, a lot of sheet music is public domain stuff anyway. It won’t be difficult to fill out the classical library, certainly.
Second, there is money in this, incentive for someone to go around setting up licensing arrangements.
Third, the Holy Grail would be an app that lets you scan in your paper sheet music (even with DRM to prevent you sharing it, to assuage the music industry’s fears… I bet they wish they could have had DRM for photocopiers!). It’s not worth it to me to buy all this music again, but it IS worth it to me to pay for an app which lets me have my sheet music in a form where pages can be turned with no hassle and I don’t need to cart a bunch of binders or books around. The ability to buy and download new sheet music instantly would be nice but isn’t the main thing.
Phil
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 10:57 AMJust occurred to me today that I *might* be willing to subscribe to my newspaper via ipad instead of rolled in plastic each morning. So it’s the LOCAL NEWSAGENT who’s really endangered by the ipad revolution.
djbouche
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 11:13 AMI’ve been waiting for this since…. since I ever heard about e-ink back in the earlier days, since ideas sparked about “bluetooth e-ink” sheet music devices. And I had anticipated the iPad would be the device to finally deliver this (even if I had to used scanned PDFs..)
This is great news for me.
Caesar Wong
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 12:07 PMHarry Connick Jr eat your heart out!
klaw
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 12:33 PMPardon me for asking the obvious, but what advantages does the iPad offer over a normal laptop for sheet music? At least a laptop screen can stand up on its own – although admittedly it would be a little more difficult to place on a piano music holder.
mr-crash
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 5:11 PMMaybe if you use that line 6 thing and you’re playing a keyboard, you could even get an application that would turn the page for you!
Some artists use things like this already, but I can’t think of too many. I know Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater has some software that does this, I think it’s called MusicReader.
But it’s really no different on an ipad versus on any other device with a screen, though I suppose really, portrait orientation looks nicer, so it’s probably not best suited to a netbook.
The problem is, in Australia in particular – publishers seem even slower to put out content for these kind of platforms. In this way, I’m excited because the ipad will hopefully make them get off their asses a little, but i’m skeptical that it will make publishers for music bother really.
So basically, for the same reason i’m not interested in an ipad as a digital replacement for my law text books, i’m not interested in it as a replacement for my sheet music. While it can probably do these things pretty well, I’m thinking Australia, at least, will end up with the short end of the straw in terms of content at least.
Bernard Perry
Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 2:11 AMHi John,
That’s an impressive looking representation of sheet music on the iPad.
However, we are told that most musicians need something bigger than a 9.5″ diagonal screen.
We have been selling the MusicPad Pro which is a 12.5″ digonal touch screen for 5 years. Jordan Rudess and Sting actually use a MusicPad.
http://www.musicpad.co.uk/
FYI and those others commenting on this subject we also have over 130,000 legitimate digital scores from big publishers like EMI, Hal Leonard and Sony, available for purchase from
http://sighreadmusic.co.uk/main.asp
Please take a look at both these web pages to see what I mean.
Bernard Perry
Marco Leoné
Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 7:29 AMMusicReader will also be available for the Apple iPad:
http://www.musicreader.net
For more information check:
http://www.musicreader.net/index.php?target=news&mode=details&news_id=38