On the business side, it's great to see Apple continue to invest in value delivery. For folks who have Apple affinity but who want lossless, this should be a no brainer. It's a much simpler (and somewhat cheaper) pricing model than streaming services with lossless/lossy tiers, which ought to pluck a few tenths of a percent of customers away from those competitors as well.
In terms of art, I'm in a kind of wait-and-see mode. Recordings have been doing simple panning for a long time. Artists already have quite a powerful set of tools for creating a soundstage, but I'm curious to see how they take advantage of an even more sophisticated medium.
At a meta level, what's interesting about this is that, although these standards can be adopted by anyone, Apple is (for now at least) basically verticalizing music production. They can pitch to artists that X% of Apple Music customers have spatial-audio-capable devices, Y% have capable headphones, and they can 'sell' the value of the additional Atmos/spatial production work as a function of a well-defined TAM rather than in a vacuum.
If the art side is actually good, fans have a reason to stay in the Apple ecosystem — to hear a better, more true-to-intent version of the music.
The crux of this is: do these features actually produce innovation in music production that artists and fans agree is a way of elevating the form? If not, it's a dud; if so, Apple has a big head start.
In terms of art, I'm in a kind of wait-and-see mode. Recordings have been doing simple panning for a long time. Artists already have quite a powerful set of tools for creating a soundstage, but I'm curious to see how they take advantage of an even more sophisticated medium.
At a meta level, what's interesting about this is that, although these standards can be adopted by anyone, Apple is (for now at least) basically verticalizing music production. They can pitch to artists that X% of Apple Music customers have spatial-audio-capable devices, Y% have capable headphones, and they can 'sell' the value of the additional Atmos/spatial production work as a function of a well-defined TAM rather than in a vacuum.
If the art side is actually good, fans have a reason to stay in the Apple ecosystem — to hear a better, more true-to-intent version of the music.
The crux of this is: do these features actually produce innovation in music production that artists and fans agree is a way of elevating the form? If not, it's a dud; if so, Apple has a big head start.