Music Ally

I’m here at the Music 4.5 conference in London, and second up is a session focusing on music tech startups – with Mixcloud and RjDj taking the stage to talk about their services, and their experiences working with the music industry.

Well, Mixcloud founder Nikhil Shah is talking about ‘music and sociability’. His company offers a streaming music service, focused on radio and DJ sets. “I’m not going to talk about revenue or commercialisation,” he says.

(Insert your own ‘Which startup does?’ joke here)

But no, he’s talking about customer acquisition first, and how a music site like Mixcloud gets its signups. You can pay for them, or you can get them for free via referrals and virality. “What we’re doing is using the fact that music is inherently social to turn our user base into an army of marketeers,” he says.

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We’ve been fans of the RjDj iPhone app since it launched: it turns the ambient noises of the real around you into generative music, using the iPhone mic as an input. Now the company behind it has launched a branded version for UK electro-pop artist Little Boots.

The app – Little Boots Reactive remixer – includes three ’scenes’ based on songs from her debut album: Meddle, New In Town and Remedy. Each scene lets you hear the song in different ways depending on what noises are around you, and how you move your iPhone.

On the branding side, there are also preview clips of other songs from the album, access to Boots’ website, blog, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter pages, and some of her videos. There’s no shortage of iPhone ‘remix your fave artist’ apps, but we like the twist that RjDj’s technology gives this one.

UPDATE: Boots herself has been talking about the app. “its something we’ve been working on a long time and has developed into a lot more than I ever dreamed of at the start,” she says. “I hope in the future we can take it even further and build a great community through it.”

Max Lousada, chairman of her label Atlantic Records UK, is also pretty chuffed. “By continuing to refresh the application’s content we’re fostering her following’s on-going engagement with the album as well as offering an evolving product through which new fans can discover this remarkable talent,” he says.

We’ve written a fair bit about promotional music apps on iPhone for artists like Pink, Snow Patrol, Lady GaGa and Soulja Boy. But what about iPhone apps that let you create music of your own? There are hundreds available, and as yesterday’s viral video from UK band The Mentalists showed, they can be put to innovative use.

We’ve put together ten of our favourites, based on our last few months of messing about on iPhone. They’re not all serious (Bebot – Robot Synth is marvellously silly), but they do hint at the potential for Apple’s handset as a music-making device. Each one comes with a YouTube video demo so you can see what we’re on about. Well, nearly each one.

1. technoBox (£5.99). It’s a 303 bass machine plus 808 and 909 drum machines in one app, with a tactile touch interface. As a technical achievement it’s hugely impressive, although if we’re honest, the appeal for us is simply blasting out squiggly acid bloops. Get it

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We put the RjDj Album application in our roundup of our 12 favourite iPhone music apps earlier this week, but now Business Week has an interesting interview with the founder of the company behind it, Reality Jockey.

The app turns the real-world sounds around you into music. The company’s founder, Michael Breidenbrücker, was actually one of the co-founders of Last.fm, which we didn’t know. He says RjDj has been downloaded more than 150,000 times for iPhone so far, and interestingly, that labels are interested.

In fact, the article quotes him as saying RjDj is about to sign some kind of deal with “a major recording artist”, with the implication that they’ll create some kind of generative audio track for the app, which fans could then listen to. The business model is that a musician who creates some music for the app gets 10% of the revenues. One to watch, it seems.

We’ve been banging on about iPhone applications for a while ago, and in last week’s issue of the Music Ally Report, we covered some of the ways iPhone apps are coming onto the music industry’s radar. But which apps are we actually using on our iPhones, hmm?

We thought we should tell you. So, here’s a dozen of the best iPhone music apps, complete with links to buy them.

1. Guitar Rock Tour (£4.99 – right)
A music game that pretty much swipes the Guitar Hero formula and runs off with it cackling. You have to tap the frets at the bottom of the screen as notes travel down a guitar, with an array of proper songs including Beat It, Smoke On The Water, Heart-Shaped Box and – yes! – Rock You Like A Hurricane. Get it

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