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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With a name like that, we thought this had to be unofficial – but no, Mariah Carey-oke is an iPhone app made by UMG. It costs $3.99, and lets people sing along to four of Mariah’s songs – Obsessed, Touch My Body, Don’t Forget About Us and Shake It Off – scoring points if they do it well enough.

“There are four levels of difficulty to pass through as you master the rhymes and train your voice to sound just like Mariah Carey,” says the blurb, although we sense you may need artificial help from a dog-whistle to really nail it. News, tour info and Facebook/Twitter integration are all built in too.

Our only criticism: couldn’t they have picked more famous Mariah songs? Perhaps it’s not a problem for the hardcore fans who’ll snap this app up, but for those of us you who fancy a crack at Vision Of Love, I’ll Be There or that one with Westlife in the boat, the tracklist may be disappointing. EDIT: We’ve just twigged it’s probably because UMG don’t own the rights to those tracks.