Working Knowledge: Behind Apple's Strategy: Be Second to Market. "Apple smartly surveyed the marketplace and discerned that any competitive software platforms would win or lose based on ease of use. Therefore, Apple stressed GarageBand's approachability from the start.

As expected, Apple's software has gained appreciable momentum with desktop musicians in the year since Mayer's performance. MacJams.com, an online community for users of Apple's GarageBand software, has posted more than 7,500 songs made with GarageBand in the past eighteen months while a separate online community, iCompositions, has posted more than 12,600 songs.

By comparison, EMI, the U.K.-based music recording and publishing conglomerate, started operations in 1931 and has slowly grown to become the largest music publisher in the world, holding the rights to just more than one million compositions. The two standalone Web sites mentioned above, with little or no ability to attract (let alone pay) musicians, have compiled 2 percent of EMI's seventy-four-year, million-song catalog in less than eighteen months.

This push approach, supplying all new Mac customers with the software, is complemented by pull from amateur musicians who find the software "good enough" for serious studio work. In August 2004, independent folk guitarist Steve Sobek established himself as the first recording artist to release a complete album produced entirely on Apple's GarageBand software. When asked why he chose to create a full album in GarageBand, Sobeck responded, "I wasn't thinking that big at first. I was . . . just relieved that I could finally record songs on a program without having to read a 500-page manual."

We expect GarageBand to follow with podcast-editing tools. Apple has also received multiple requests to release, through its iTunes service, new music that can be edited using GarageBand. If Apple decides to go this route, we can expect another round of explosive, new-market growth in desktop studio production, no doubt handled with the same savvy attention to marketing, design, and ease of use that the company has recently displayed." I believe the same can be said about Apple's Final Cut Pro Express, and iMovie + iDVD. The video editing is more involving than making music, but it will catch on sooner than later. We are living in a visual-oriented world after all. The real defining question, for me at least, is the story-the desire to communicate.