2009 was the year of the App Store, as Apple passed the two-billion downloads milestone for its store, which now has more than 100,000 apps available. The year also saw labels and artists jumping onto the bandwagon with their own branded iPhone apps.
The most successful, like Smule’s I Am T-Pain (pictured right) sold tens of thousands of copies a day. It’s only fair to point out that the vast majority sank down the app charts fairly quickly though – proving that iPhone apps provide a return on investment for the music industry wasn’t a huge priority this year.
Even so, there was plenty of creativity being put to work. To highlight it, we’ve chosen a selection of 40 branded music apps that we thought were innovative this year – which were all covered in the Music Ally Daily Bulletin.
They’re all based on artists, labels and other music brands – the list doesn’t include apps for music services like Spotify or Pandora, nor does it include pure music games like Rock Band or Tap Tap Revenge (although one of the latter’s artist-branded spin-offs is included).
Read on for a snapshot of what was released this year, and let us know your thoughts on the best and worst of what the App Store had to offer. Oh, and yes, we’ve put them in a rough order reflecting how much we liked them, starting with the best.
Britney Spears’ 3.7 million Twitter followers might have worried she’d gone off the deep end again yesterday. “I give myself to Lucifer every day for it to arrive as quickly as possible. Glory to Satan!” she tweeted, quickly followed by “I hope that the new world order will arrive as soon as possible!”.
But no, Britney hasn’t turned to a religion even more esoteric than Kabbalah or Scientology – her Twitter account was hacked. It’s since been rectified – the latest tweet apologises for any offence caused.
We’d imagine Britney’s management will have some hard questions for Twitter to answer though, as this is the second time the account has been hacked – earlier this year, surprised fans were informed by tweet that Britney possessed a vagina with teeth.
If you follow our buzz chart in the Music Ally Report, you’ll know that Lady GaGa has reigned supreme in recent months as the most popular artist online. At last, there’s some bad news: she was also one of the artists most often deleted from people’s Last.fm scrobbles in June.
That’s according to a top ten released by the music service, showing tracks that people played, but then deleted presumably out of embarrassment. GaGa’s Poker Face tops the chart, and she has three more tracks in the top ten.
Britney Spears has three. In fact, it’s notable that nine of the ten are by female singers (and the tenth is by Paramore, a female-fronted band). Are Last.fm’s male users a bit sensitive about their penchant for girly pop?
Big Champagne has compiled a list of the most popular music artists on Twitter, headed by Britney Spears with 995,807 followers at the point the chart was compiled. Which should be some consolation to Britney for losing out in the race to one million followers to Ashton Kutcher.
The rest of the top ten is made up by John Mayer, Diddy, Coldplay, Sara Bareilles, A Fine Frenzy, Soulja Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Heidi Montag and Ashlee Simpson. Although how Heidi Montag qualifies as a music artist, we honestly don’t know. Isn’t there a separate chart for People On The Hills Who Float About Doing Not Much?
It’s interesting to compare this new list with the Top Bands on Facebook list we published in January, whose top ten was made up of Rihanna, Coldplay, Lil Wayne, Linkin Park, Chris Brown, Metallica, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Justin Timberlake.
Only Coldplay appear on both lists. Call them bed-wetters if you must, but they’re at least fully connected Web 2.0 multimedia node bed-wetters.
Suing your fans – especially the web-savvy ones with a large online audience – is never a good idea. Still, that’s what the owner of Britney Spears fansite BreatheHeavy claims has been threatened by the singer’s father Jamie Spears.
Site owner Jordan Miller says it’s shutting down under threat of an injunction for posting unauthorised song lyrics, photos, videos and audio clips. However, the real reason – says Miller – is to “hide the truth about Britney’s imprisonment, and shut anyone up who disagrees with their conniving and selfish exploitation of an innocent mother of 2 pushed back into the limelight just several months after a hospitalization.”
You probably get an idea of why Poppa Spears isn’t that fond of BreatheHeavy from that quote. However, if we can offer some advice to Miller, it’s that pixelising the images don’t as such get you out of the copyright infringement problem…
If you’re a modern band with a strong connection to your fans, why not get them to do some free work for you? Like remix your new single, or create a video for it, or provide footage for your website or DVD by filming themselves covering your songs. The user-generated content (UGC) fan contest is increasingly a core part of music marketing campaigns. Here’s some of the ways to do it.
Remixable stems
Forget paying a superstar DJ a fat fee to mess with your masterpieces. Increasingly, artists are making their songs available for fans to remix. Radiohead’s release of individual instrument ‘stems’ for Nude through iTunes is one of the most famous examples, but Franz Ferdinand did it for Ulysses via Beatport, and Erykah Badu and Linkin Park have both done it. A couple of artists – K-OS and Third Eye Blind – have made their tracks available for remixing before the actual albums were out, with K-OS promising to include the best ones on the album itself.
Today’s hot new thing among people who don’t have enough work so spend their day managing their social media profiles is… TwitterSheep! It’s a simple site where you type in your Twitter username, and it goes off and analyses the biographies of all your followers, before turning the keywords into a big tag cloud.
We tried it for our Twitter feed, and the results weren’t exactly surprising: MUSIC is by far the biggest tag, with DIGITAL, MEDIA, INDUSTRY and MARKETING also featuring. JUNKIE, MAN and GEEK aren’t quite so popular – possibly all three were used in the same bio.
Anyway, TwitterSheep is quite fun, and you can do it for anyone’s Twitter feed – trying it for Britney Spears reveals that lots of her followers have LOVE, MUSIC, WHO and, er, IM in their bios.
Viral video phenomenon Jizz In My Pants is battling it out with the biggest music stars on YouTube, judging by a chart produced by BigChampagne.
The company has been tracking the most popular music videos on YouTube, with most of the top ten not being that surprising. For the week ending 4 January, Britney Spears’ Womanizer took top spot with 4.01 million, followed by Lady Gaga’s Poker Face (3.35 million) and Britney again with Circus (3.01 million).
The only surprise in the top ten is fifth-placed Jizz In My Pants by The Lonely Island – a comedy video that came from US TV show Saturday Night Live. It’s the only video in BigChampagne’s chart that you could describe as viral, rather than from a big pop act. Indeed, BigChampagne’s data reveals that The Lonely Island’s track isn’t performing anywhere near as well on P2P networks.
If you’re Web 2.0 savvy and looking for a new job, you might want to check out this vacancy for a 2.0 Media Manager at Brandcasting Unlimited, responsible for Britney Spears’ online identity and digital properties.
That means YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, posting exclusive content, running contests, launching email marketing campaigns, and engaging with fans. It’s an interesting insight into the skills required to manage the identity of major artists online nowadays.
And probably just a co-incidence that the post is vacant the week after someone hacked into Britney’s Twitter account and posted that her vagina was “about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth”. Either that, or someone’s been sacked like a hot potato.
Okay, so we’ve talked before about how good Twitter can be as a direct communication channel between artists and fans. But there’s a downside – if your Twitter account gets hacked. Yesterday saw more than 30 celebrities and Web 2.0 companies’ Twitter feeds hijacked by unknown hackers, including Britney Spears.
The first fans knew of the latter was a Twitter post saying “Hi Yall! Brit Brit here, just wanted to update you all on the size of my vagina. Its about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth.”
At least she wasn’t alone though: other accounts hacked included Barack Obama, Fox News and Facebook.
2009 was the year of the App Store, as Apple passed the two-billion downloads milestone for its store, which now has more than 100,000 apps available. The year also saw labels and artists jumping onto the bandwagon with their own branded iPhone apps.
Suing your fans – especially the web-savvy ones with a large online audience – is never a good idea. Still, that’s what the owner of Britney Spears fansite BreatheHeavy claims has been threatened by the singer’s father Jamie Spears.
If you’re a modern band with a strong connection to your fans, why not get them to do some free work for you? Like remix your new single, or create a video for it, or provide footage for your website or DVD by filming themselves covering your songs. The user-generated content (UGC) fan contest is increasingly a core part of music marketing campaigns. Here’s some of the ways to do it.
