Music Ally

Here’s a double whammy for dads everywhere: Snow Patrol and Neil Diamond have launched new iPhone apps.

Snow Patrol are grizzled veterans of the App Store world, having been one of the first artists to launch their own iPhone app last year. Now the band has put its name to a follow-up, the logically-named Snow Patrol. It includes a news feed, forum access, store and a nifty photo galleries feature. The latter will allow fans to take snaps at Snow Patrol gigs and upload them from the app to a dedicated section of the band’s website.

Meanwhile, there’s also a nice snowflake interface – fans use touch to make a unique virtual snowflake, which then becomes their way of navigating around the app. The free application is promoting the band’s new Greatest Hits album.

And Diamond? His first iPhone app has been released to promote his upcoming A Cherry Cherry Christmas festive album, and offers Neil news, his Twitter feed (no, we didn’t know he was on Twitter either), photos and videos.

One of the issues bubbling out of the Live Nation / Ticketmaster merger is the involvement of artists and managers in the secondary ticketing market. The Wall Street Journal has an expose whose opening paragraph makes the issue clear:

“Less than a minute after tickets for last August’s Neil Diamond concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.”

The article goes on to examine Ticketmaster’s policy of listing hundreds of the best seats for some concerts on its secondary ticketing websites, and splitting the additional revenue with the artists and promoters. The WSJ also fingers recent tours by Bon Jovi, Celine Dion and Van Halen as examples of this.