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.
One of the big criticisms of successful new digital models like those tested by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails is this: they’re Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, with millions of fans. What about unknown artists?
It’s a valid point, and one that NIN’s Trent Reznor has just addressed head on in a post on his forum. His advice: Make music cheaply and give it away, build an email database, and then work with someone like TopSpin to sell premium packages. And build a community:
“Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS.”
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor is rightly hailed as one of the most forward-thinking artists when it comes to digital marketing and social networking, so news that he’s (kinda) quit Twitter is saddening. His Twitter feed is now one-way – just announcements, no replies.
In a long post on his forum, he explains that it’s because of spammers and haters. “I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.”
Specifically, it seems Reznor and his other half have been suffering abuse on Twitter, which he suggests has been caused by the fact that he’s “not the same person I was in 1994″. And he has a theory on this, too:
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has blasted Apple for what he describes as an inconsistent approach to obscene content. Apple rejected an updatedversion of the Nine Inch Nails iPhone app, possibly on the basis that it provided access to “The Downward Spiral”, a song with explicit lyrics. Reznor griped on Twitter that the very same song is available on the iTunes store, saying: “Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem – as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid f***ing standards?” At the moment, although the iTunes store has a parental guidance function allowing parents to prevent their kids from downloading songs with naughty lyrics, there is no equivalent feature for iPhone apps. For the time being Reznor’’s development team has removed the link to the offending track.
Yep, him again. Trent Reznor is launching a new iPhone app called Nearby, which lets fans post messages and photos tagged with their location, while having conversations with nearby fans (for example at gigs). It’ll also tie into the Nine Inch Nails website, with these photos and messages accessible through a Google Earth interface.
The news comes in a Wired interview which digs into some of NIN’s other innovative marketing stuff, working with Californian company Sudjam. It also reveals that more than 11,000 fans have so far remixed NIN songs and uploaded them to the band’s website, and that the NIN fan database is now two-million strong.
“As an artist, you are now the marketer,” says Reznor. A fascinating read.
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.
Hats (or hi-hats) off to Lars Ulrich out of Metallica – despite being surrounded by reps from his label WMG at a recent press event, he was happy to talk about the band’s plans to possibly go it alone now its deal with the label has expired.
“Let’s cut to the chase: The primary – not the only, but the primary – function of a record label is to act as a bank. When you’re fortunate enough to be successful and so on, you don’t need to rely on record companies as the banks… We’re doing a bunch of shows with Trent [Reznor - of Nine Inch Nails] this summer in Europe. I look forward to sitting down and talking to him about what’s on his radar.”
Reznor, of course, has been trying tactics like giving away his album on BitTorrent – and even setting up his own torrent tracker. We suspect Metallica would draw the line at this, but whatever you think of the band’s previous attitudes towards file-sharing, taking tips from NIN on how to evolve in the digital era is a positive move.
Well, unless you’re WMG of course. Meanwhile, Ulrich is also excited about the Guitar Hero: Metallica game that’s coming out. “I really believe that if we sit here five years from now or ten years… it’ll be a fairly standard way of releasing music.”
Want to get the tour sampler for the new Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction tour? It’s called NIN/JA, and you can find it on BitTorrent.
Well, you can find the MP3 tracks on the band’s own site, but lossless versions are being distributed via BitTorrent, apparently to ensure the server doesn’t fall over, as it reportedly did when they distributed the high-quality files for last year’s Ghosts album on their own site.
In fact, NIN have gone one step further and hosted the torrent files on their own torrent tracker. It’s just the latest example of the band’s desire to think innovatively when it comes to digital distribution. As a reminder of its previous efforts, watch the presentation below, from MidemNet this year.
In a post on his website’s forum, Nine Inch Nails mainman Trent Reznor has addressed (at length) the issue of secondary ticketing, accusing Live Nation and Ticketmaster of intentionally supporting and fuelling the secondary market – a theme that’s been explored elsewhere in the last couple of weeks.
NIN is taking its own steps to stop the scalping:
“NIN gets 10% of the available seats for our own pre-sale. We won a tough (and I mean TOUGH) battle to get the best seats. We require you to sign up at our site (for free) to get tickets. We limit the amount you can buy, we print your name on the tickets and we have our own person let you in a separate entrance where we check your ID to match the ticket,” he writes.
“We have essentially stopped scalping by doing these things – because we want true fans to be able to get great seats and not get ripped off by these parasites.”
It’s intriguing that with all the industry talk about getting artists closer to fans, the issue around artists’ and labels’ involvement in secondary ticketing is blowing up. Reznor’s comments strongly paint the former as hypocritical if you’re also doing the latter.
Y’know how the Hot New Thing is offering different levels of album package/download, like Nine Inch Nails did last year? So there’s the pay-what-you-want basic download, the luxury box-set, the even more luxury box-set, and so on?
Well, former NIN drummer Josh Freese is spoofing the idea with his new album, which starts at $7 for the download and videos, and rises through 11 levels.
So the $1,000 package includes him washing your car or doing your laundry, the $5,000 package involves him giving you a private tour of Disneyland, and for $75,000 he’ll join your band for a month, give you a flying trapeze lesson, and show you the ropes in Tijuana.
The full list is after the jump below – presumably Trent Reznor will get the joke… (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.
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has blasted Apple for what he describes as an inconsistent approach to obscene content. Apple rejected an updatedversion of the Nine Inch Nails iPhone app, possibly on the basis that it provided access to “The Downward Spiral”, a song with explicit lyrics. Reznor griped on Twitter that the very same song is available on the iTunes store, saying: “Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem – as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid f***ing standards?” At the moment, although the iTunes store has a parental guidance function allowing parents to prevent their kids from downloading songs with naughty lyrics, there is no equivalent feature for iPhone apps. For the time being Reznor’’s development team has removed the link to the offending track.
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.
Hats (or hi-hats) off to Lars Ulrich out of Metallica – despite being surrounded by reps from his label WMG at a recent press event, he was 
Want to get the tour sampler for the new Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction tour? It’s called NIN/JA, and you can find it on BitTorrent.
In a 
