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.
Coldplay has announced plans to give away a free nine-track live album, LeftRightLeftRightLeft, at every gig this year. That’ll be in CD form, but the album will also be made available as a free download from the band’s website for fans not attending the concerts.
The band are describing it as a “recession-busting mark of gratitude” to fans. The tracks are taken from recordings of various gigs from Coldplay’s recent Viva La Vida tour, and the band have unveiled the tracklisting and artwork online.
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.
Coldplay have their own iPhone music game, courtesy of US developer Tapulous. It’s a revamped version of that company’s Tap Tap Revenge game, meaning the British band are following in Nine Inch Nails and Weezer’s footsteps.
It’s also another sign of Tapulous’ good working relationship with EMI, which has previously supplied tracks from Katy Perry for Tap Tap Revenge itself. Tap Tap Coldplay is being sold for £2.99 here in the UK App Store, and offers ten of the band’s hits to tap along with, plus remixes.
Oh, and it integrates with Facebook, has a Coldplay news feed and lets users buy songs on the iTunes Store too. Although as you can see from the end of our video (above) that we shot this morning, the latter feature has some teething issues.
Fancy a go? Click here to get it from the App Store.
No, not this one. This one. It’s a column written by India Knight in the Sunday Times this weekend about ‘Generation Freeload’, and you really should read it in full. Why? Well:
- “When Coldplay put their latest album online and said people could pay as much as they wanted for it – 5p or £5 or whatever they felt like – it turned out that most people still downloaded it illegally, for convenience.”
- “Downloads have already completely transformed (ie, killed) the music business, but I’d mind more if it hadn’t for so long appeared to be run by grossly overpaid people who never seemed to do much apart from take inhuman quantities of cocaine.”
- “There is a whole class of people that never pays for things, or at least not for the things that the rest of us regularly get our wallet out for. They’re the ones you find yourself sitting next to on a supposedly budget airline flight: you’ve coughed up £200 for your seat; they gleefully tell you they paid a fiver. They’ve watched the film du jour weeks before it opens in the UK. They listen to free music and don’t watch television by episode but by series.”
Oh my. The general tone of the column makes us hardly surprised the writer has confused Coldplay for Radiohead, but what were you thinking Sunday Times subs?
Are labels and managers doing a good job of building communities around their artists on Facebook? Well, none make the ten most popular fan pages on the social network.
In order, they are: Barack Obama, Coca-Cola, Homer J Simpson, Nutella, Pizza, Mr Bean, Michael Phelps, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, and Kinder Surprise. This is according to a chart compiled by AllFacebook.
I’ve dug out the 20 most popular music artist fan pages from the chart though, and they are (with number of fans):
1. Rihanna (1.52 million)
2. Coldplay (1.49 million)
3. Lil Wayne (1.34 million)
4. Linkin Park (1.33 million)
5. Chris Brown (1.3 million)
6. Metallica (1.22 million)
7. Pink Floyd (1.16 million)
8. Bob Marley (1.13 million)
9. Red Hot Chili Peppers (1.12 million)
10. Justin Timberlake (1.05 million)
11. AC/DC (997,000)
12. Daft Punk (912,000)
13. Beyonce (906,000)
14. Queen (900,000)
15. Evanescence (873,000)
16. Jonas Brothers (843,000)
17. Radiohead (793,000)
18. Kanye West (792,000)
19. Katy Perry (791,000)
20. Akon (753,000)
It’s a good resource, anyway. Props to Mashable for spotting it.
EMI Music claims that Coldplay’s new album `Viva La Vida’ is now the biggest ever paid album download, having shifted 394.000 digital copies in the last three weeks (this is based on Nielsen Soundscan figures in the US). That’s a big chunk of the overall 1.1 million sales too – bolstered by the band’s digital promotions in the run-up to its release with iTunes.
After the recent upheavals and ongoing job cuts, EMI staff can at least dance about in joy counting sales of the new Coldplay album, which shifted 721,000 copies in the US alone in its first week. 288,000 of those were digital sales- an impressive 39.9%. It’s thought that iTunes may have contributed as much as 275,000 of those, and Apple has confirmed that Viva la Vida or Death And All His Friends has smashed its pre-sale and first-week digital album sale records. Meanwhile, digital sales of the band’s previous album X&Y increased by a factor of 40, helped by price promotions on etailers such as Amazon’s MP3 Store
Analysis from web metrics firm Hitwise indicates that Radiohead were more successful than Nine Inch Nails and Coldplay at attracting and then maintaining traffic following their recent album promotions/giveaways. Radiohead’s website saw a bigger spike around the release of In Rainbows than the other bands saw around (more…)
Coldplay’s free download ‘Violet Hill’ Coldplay has apparently been downloaded 600,000 in 24 hours according to EMI, which has already dubbed the trial a ‘huge success’. The DRM-free track will only be available until it goes on sale as a paid download on May 6. Did nobody tell Chris Martin that Thom Yorke (more…)
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.
