Music Ally

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.

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Music Ally has been studying the intersection between entertainment and technology since 2000, publishing reports throughout that time. But now that we’re fewer than two weeks from the start of a new decade, Music Ally has taken some time to reflect on the past ten years – a decade that will forever be remembered as the era when digital entertainment went mainstream.

Since 2003, all subscribers to the full Music Ally service have been able to search our archives of news, insight and analysis. Today, as part of a series in which we excerpt the most fascinating digital music events of the years 2000-2008. we unearth some of our reports from the year 2000.  

Sign up for a free two-week trial to Music Ally and get access to all our past reports and bulletins plus a suite of research tools including market data, a deal tracker and an analyst forecast tracker. In the most recent PDF Report you can find a rundown of 2009’s big events plus an extensive timeline detailing the key digital music happenings of the past ten years.

And continue reading after the jump to take a look back at the year 2000, as we reported it at the time.

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BT, the UK’s largest ISP, has come out strongly against any plans to make ISPs police file-sharing. John Petter, boss of the company’s consumer division, claims the costs for ISPs could be £1 million a day, and has some stinging words for the music industry.

“They’ve lobbied hard and very effectively but that doesn’t make them right. Their claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense… ”

Oh, and: “Laws already exist to enable music companies and other copyright holders to prosecute offenders but they don’t want to take the hit to their public image.”

It’s not so long – MidemNet earlier this year in fact – that the music industry and ISP trade body were making calm-the-waters speeches about the need to work hand-in-hand to fight piracy. It looks like that united front has gone out of the window since the UK government announced that temporary internet suspensions were back on its legislation agenda.

BT’s bullish stance certainly brings new bite to the debate, but we wonder whether the ISP has any innovative plans for legal music services, following in the footsteps of rivals Virgin Media and BSkyB.

Brian ”BT” Transeau has announced a new iPhone app to promote his new album The Rose of Jericho. Created for the trance DJ by developer Sonik Architects, Sonifi lets fans remix his songs and videos, adding beats and sounds, while shaking their iPhone for a so-called “stutter edit”.

We’re also very impressed by the way it uses the new iPhone 3.0 software to provide a Bluetooth two-person mode, where one of you controls beats and bass, while the other handles melody and harmony. Soon, other artists will be included via downloadable packs.

We said in last week’s Music Ally Report that iPhone 3.0 has huge potential for music apps. Well, here’s the first proof, although the latest update of Tap Tap Revenge is also hinting at great things ahead. Want a go on BT’s app? Click here to open its App Store page.

Remember we recently published links to the BPI / Virgin media letters? Well, it looks as though UK ISP BT are following suit-but taking a tougher line.  Interestingly, the story appeared  as an exlusive on The Register  at the same time as the story above. BT appears to be threatening to disconnect users who are caught file-sharing. One customer was recently sent a letter reproducing evidence collected by the BPI, indicating that they’d shared Girls Aloud’s `Biology’ using P2P client Ares. (more…)