Dave Haynes

I’m pleased to say that I had an article published in Frukt’s Five Eight magazine this month.  If you or your company doesn’t already subscribe to Five Eight then you should seriously consider it - if only for the daily news bulletin that they send out to subscribers. For those who don’t already subscribe I wanted to make the article available for my own readers here on this blog.

The full text is below and you can also download the whole thing as a nice glossy PDF. I’ll also be publishing the four full interviews that I did with Tapulous, Last.fm, Intua and RjDj whilst researching the article.

Another paradigm shift in music consumption

Back in 2001 Apple launched iPod + iTunes. For better or for worse it revolutionized how we consumed, purchased and enjoyed music. A whole new ecosystem built up around the devices. Hardware manufacturers started building accessories specifically for the iPod and companies rushed to integrate iPod connections into their existing devices. For a cautious music industry the iTunes music store promised hope of a new digital market for music sales that had failed to ignite previously. Love it or hate it, the iPod was a game changer.

Fast forward to 2009 and Apple have done it again with the iPhone and its little sister the iPod Touch. On July 11, 2007, iTunes itself also moved beyond just music and video. The App Store allows users to buy and download new software from third party developers to their iPhones. In fact over 500 million apps have now been downloaded, equating to around 2.1 million per day, with more than 15,000 apps available. Many of these are music apps. Although the changes are more subtle and the implications for the music industry and consumers are different, Apple has instigated another paradigm shift for the way we consume and interact with music.

New applications for music

There are now literally thousands of music-based applications for the iPhone that take the mobile device way beyond the traditional playback functions of the iPod and their users’ digital music collections. One such application pushing the boundaries is RjDj, a completely novel app that combines all the different functionalities of the iPhone and somehow creates a whole new musical genre. Users download different ‘scenes’ that take sensory inputs to generate and control the music you are listening to. Despite it’s mind-bending affects, the app quickly found success with iPhone users and was downloaded over 50,000 times in just its first 10 days on the iTunes App Store. Not bad for what is essentially a music album with no traditional artists.

And Michael Breidenbrucker, RjDj’s founder, is excited about the future, ‘the iPhone is the new Walkman but it now has so many things that Walkmans simply didn’t have before. It’s essentially a mobile computing device with a CPU, networking, wi-fi, speakers, microphone, networking, GPS and even accelerometer data.”

All these different elements have created a rich platform that not only allows developers to make amazing music-based applications but also takes them onto every street and into the mainstream.

Moving beyond the iTunes library

Streaming music apps like Last.fm and Pandora have also proved extremely popular, allowing listeners to move beyond their iTunes Music library and tap into an almost unlimited selection of music, streaming directly from the internet.

“It’s always been our argument that music consumption will move towards access rather than ownership,” states Last.fm’s Christian Ward, “the iPhone is the key device at the moment, certainly in terms of streaming music on the go. For us it’s part of a wider strategy of making Last.fm available wherever you need it to be, whether that’s on the go, in the car, at home, wherever.”

With over 13million iPhones and many more iPod Touch’s sold to date it could be argued that it will be Apple, not streaming services like Napster or Rhapsody that will truly bring cloud-based music consumption into the mainstream.

And Last.fm themselves have further plans for tapping into the potential of the iPhone. “Some of things that we really want to investigate and experiment with in the future are the events and geolocation stuff,” Christian explains, “It would be ideal to have a feature where you’d be walking past venues in London and your iPhone could tell you that one of your favourite bands was playing there in a couple of hours”.

More interaction with music

But it’s not just the way that we discover, organize and playback music that the iPhone is changing. It’s opening up new ways of interacting with music as well. The recent rise of music based gaming really comes into its own on a mobile device that users also see as a music device. Tap Tap Revenge, a Guitar Hero-like game, has taken the App Store by storm and has now been installed by over 5 million people worldwide.

Tapulous COO, Robert Andrews points out that , “As a game it’s starting to be more along the lines of an interactive music video rather than balls coming down on a rail that you have to tap to.” He adds, “It’s important to keep pushing the envelope because people really do want to interact with the music they don’t just want to listen to it.”

These games have also created new revenue streams for labels, not just through licensed premium apps, such as the Nine Inch Nails and Weezer editions of Tap Tap, but also through the music discovery that takes place via Tap Tap Revenge. Players receive a new track to play every Thursday and Tapulous claim weekly downloads of between 150,000 and 300,000 for popular artists such as Katy Perry, Weezer and Offspring.

Labels have reacted to successes like this by creating their own iPhone apps. Artists like Pink and Snow Patrol have both released interactive album apps through iTunes. This could just be the tip of the iceberg.

iPhone as a music creation tool

Another category of music application that has been hugely successful is music creation. Not content with just listening to music created by others, iPhone users are busy downloading and playing all manner of virtual instruments. From the Zelda-like tones of Smule’s ‘Ocarina’ that is played by blowing on the iPhone like a flute and pressing keys on its touchscreen to the numerous different virtual guitars, pianos and synthesizers that all compete for five minutes of your attention. Whilst some of these may be no more than gimmicks, fully-fledged music sequencing software such as Intua’s ‘Beatmaker’ highlight the true potential of the iPhone as a serious music creation tool for the masses.

Beatmaker’s Colin Laplace certainly believes so. “Part of the success of BeatMaker is the combination of ease of use and entertainment, which allows new-timers to create music while getting quality results that cannot be achieved with more modest applications.” He goes on to add “As for music creation, the iPhone opens new ways to think about how, when and where music can be produced. We do not see the platform as a substitute for more conventional tools, but as a great musician companion when creativity strikes.”

An exciting future ahead

So it looks set to be an exciting future for music on the iPhone. Apple is creating new opportunities for the music industry and for developers with novel ideas. With sales of recorded music on the decline these are opportunities that need to be identified and embraced.

“There are some pretty powerful forces at play here,” concludes Tapulous’ Robert Andrews. “The intersection of music and mobile is very hot still. Particularly on the iPhone because you have to remember that the route to the iPhone is the iPod, a music listening device. It’s a very natural extension of the device and I feel pretty confident that that’s going to grow strongly over the next 12 months.”

Apple has changed the game, again.

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