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Posts Tagged ‘robbie williams’

The 40 best branded iPhone music apps of 2009

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

i-am-t-pain-autotune-iphone-22009 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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Spotify nabs exclusive on new Robbie Williams album

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Spotify has announced that it will be exclusively streaming the new Robbie Williams album in the UK from midnight this Friday, in advance of its release next Monday.

Interestingly, the exclusive is for ALL Spotify users in the UK, marking a break from its previous policy of restricting such pre-release streams to premium customers only. Such exclusives are increasingly common – UK rival we7 is currently running one for former Suede singer Brett Anderson together with the Independent newspaper, for example.

The news is further proof that labels are seeing these ad-supported streaming services as key elements in their marketing strategies around new albums. That goes against a recent strategy report by Forrester which suggested the streaming services should be last in the queue when it comes to hot new albums, to avoid cannibalising sales.

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