What Apple's Big Announcement Means for Music Fans

How will this pretty little thing shake up the music world?

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Yeah, yeah, the new iPhone 4 is slick and skinny and sports two video cameras. But will today's news shake up the music world as Apple developments have in the past? Our thoughts below:

Mobile music videos: Get ready for a world of iPhone-produced music videos. We mean videos that weren't just shot with the iPhone 4's HD-quality video camera, but edited and produced entirely on the phone. Apple's new iOS 4 allows users to add any song on the phone's onboard music library to videos, which means one could make a music video pretty much anywhere. Couple this with the flood of music-making apps available for the iPhone -- which have proven capable of producing an entire album's worth of music -- and this little smartphone could theoretically catapult you to stardom on its own. Theoretically.

No Apple Lala or cloud-based iTunes service... yet: In some ways, the biggest music news out of today's Worldwide Developers Conference was what didn't come. The music-streaming service Lala, which Apple purchased in December and shut down last month, remains a memory, and no announcement came today that might shed light on what Apple plans to do with it. Speculation has of course centered on sending clunky iTunes to the online cloud -- making your music library available anywhere you can stream files from the web. Music fans were understandably stoked about the idea. But speculation it remains.

Hardcore music geeks still need an iPod classic: Yeah, Steve, you heard us. We gave up deciding whether we really needed all of Dylan's 1960s catalog in our pocket a long time ago, and we're not going back. If you think we're going to walk down the street with only the music that will fit on the largest iPhone 4's piddly 32GB hard drive, you're crazy. Or smart enough to figure how to keep us buying more Apple gadgets.

Big battery life: Apple claims the iPhone 4 will play music for 40 hours on one charge. So if you don't talk to anyone, don't download anything and don't use any other features, you can now listen to Taylor Swift on repeat every single hour of your workweek. Joy.

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