Did Apple just kill a small part of the music industry?

Ever since the iPhone and iPod Touch caught the atten­tion of developers of developers with an interest in music, there have been music apps in the iTunes App store.

With yes­ter­day’s announce­ment of Gar­age Band for iPad these smal­ler niche developers could be chal­lenged by the vast devel­op­ment resources Apple can bring to bear.

Gar­age Band iPad
Dig­ging into the details, iPad Gar­age Band really looks like a great all-in-one pack­age with a good selec­tion of instru­ments, instru­ment enhance­ments (Smart Instru­ments), Plug-ins, Syn­this­izers, and Digit­al Audio Work­sta­tion com­pon­ents (Amps & Effects), as well as multi-track edit­ing and recording.

Wow, there’s a lot there for $4.99. Ser­i­ously. I’ll be get­ting it.

What’s out there now
Tak­ing a quick look at some of the lead­ing music cre­ation and instru­ment­a­tion apps in the store, you’d exceed that level by just buy­ing one app, in many cases.

Record­ing

• Mul­ti­Track DAW — $9.99
• NanoStu­dio — $14.99

Sequen­cers

• Beatmaker2 — $19.99
• iSequence — $14.99

Instru­ments / Synths

• Korg iMS-20 — 32.99
• XENON Groove Syn­thes­izer — $4.99
• Bassist — $2.99
• Gui­tar­ist — $3.99
• Thum­b­Jam — $6.99

You see the challenge?
For con­sumers and soft­ware developers, once again, Apple has redefined an industry, but per­haps not in a good way. Or did they just make a state­ment that the exist­ing apps are way too over­priced? Time will tell.

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