This is part of an ongoing blab about the future of music. Which means it’s an ongoing blab about the past of music too.
So as much as I might look back fondly on those heady teenage years of listening to music crammed into someone’s bedroom, and all that went with it, the simple fact is, in terms of sheer music technology and availability, I wouldn’t swap now for then for anything.
This is something that keeps coming up in chats with old friends: god, what we would’ve done for iPods and YouTube and CDs and Amazon all the rest of it back in the day.
Our idea of technological advancement as it applied to music was when the local newsagent managed to get a copy of Melody Maker that was only a month out of date. The idea that we could’ve logged onto, say, Wolgang’s Vault and heard a full concert by Jethro Tull or Free or Emerson Lake and Palmer was a concept beyond our wildest conceptions.
One thing that strikes me about a lot of this sort of discussion is how much of it is built around the idea of trying to recreate the experience of the long playing album, the LP.
In that previous post, I linked to articles about music distributors coming up with digital equivalents of the LP cover as a way of, in their words, “resocialising” music. I wondered if this wasn’t a vain attempt to recreate an experience that younger music fans have never actually experienced.
Whatever the answer to that, the idea of the “album” being the basis of musical experience seems pervasive. Even when the message is goodbye album, hello X, the presumption is that the X, the new thing, is somehow replicating the spot formerly held by the album.
Take this article about the development of music apps for iPhones.
It talks about the way various musicians are using the software provided by iLike to build their own iPhone/iPod apps:
Since iLike launched the service in May, about 250 of the over 300,000 artists with access to iLike’s dashboard feature have launched customized iPhone apps through the system.
“We’re encouraged by the positive response our create-your-own-app platform has generated, and this is only the beginning,” said iLike CEO Ali Partovi. (The company also announced a new version of its Local Concerts app on Tuesday, with concert listings based on your music library, push notification for shows, maps to venues, and concert information sharing.)
These artist-specific apps, which labels also develop in-house, place a constantly-updating tattoo on fans’ phones. It’s like having a music subscription, but in the sense of a fan club, rather than in the sense of subscribing to music in general as one would with Rhapsody.
Many of iLike’s music apps are free and promotional. Other apps contain full songs, and cost money.
Dave Dederer, former singer and guitarist for the Presidents of the United States of America and current Melodeo business development vice president, released one of the first of these, which charged $3 for four albums plus exclusive material. His company sells another $3 app containing streaming versions of top 100 hip hop songs in the iTunes store (iTunes link).
If you search the Apple app store, you’ll find a bunch of musicians with these sorts of apps, everyone from the John Butler Trio to Andre Rieu.
As an example, the John Butler Trio app allows you to — and I’m quoting –
browse photos
find out about concerts near you
engage with other fans across Facebook
post concert photos directly from your iPhone to the fan community
get regular bulletin updates
That’ll cost you $AU2.49
Other artists will also allow you to sample music, sometimes whole tracks, more often just excerpts. Most also play YouTube clips.
I gotta say, it’s pretty cool.
Unfortunately, none of the apps so far available are for bands or artists that I’m really that desperate about, but I’m telling you, if there was a Gillian Welch or a Lucinda Williams one, I’d be there with bells on. As to cost, I’d probably pay more, but would be thinking that anything more than five bucks would be a bit excessive.
Looking at the ones that are there, it is pretty obvious that the form is completely underdeveloped.
The potential is huge: the simple fact is, fans or aficionados can consume an endless supply of information about the objects of their interest, and the more info and interaction apps like this offer, the more willing fans are going to be to part with a few bucks for the privilege.
If I was a musician, I’d be giving apps some serious consideration as another possible revenue source.
2 Comments
Yes, it’s interesting how things have all changed. As an avid record collector in the 80’s, I was always hunting ’round the second hand record shops looking for rare live recordings (bootleg LPs) which were just like the real thing but often with pretty poor sound quality. However with the emergence of the Internet and as you mention Tim, YouTube, the once highly sought after, and usually highly-priced bootleg LP, is now a thing of the past. Today, one can just do a search on YouTube and immediately have instant access to rare and live tracks of a favourite artist that once may have taken years to track down.
It’s an interesting point about the bootlegs. I guess it’s good for artists as they have more chance of getting some cash from internet reproductions than they ever got from bootlegs etc. Then again, the ways for artists to be screwed seems pretty much unlimited…