If one thing came out strongly from our Music Apps event this week, it’s the need for more investment in making artist websites mobile-friendly, rather than just making native apps. Now some research from ShareSquare has backed this up. The company analysed the websites of 1,700 bands who are playing at SXSW, and found that 90% don’t detect or recognise mobile browsers, while a third use Flash (and thus won’t work properly on iPhones). It also found that the text is difficult to read without zooming on 33% of the sites, video content is broken or unavailable on 31%, and overall that “91% just kinda suck on mobile”. Now think about fans attending SXSW shows: if they want to know more about the band they’ve just seen, they’ll be typing their name into Google on their phones, not looking for a native app. Separately, ShareSquare found that only 29% of the websites have a Facebook Like button, and 12% a Twitter follow widget.
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