I've never been more sure of anything as when I predicted last August that iPhone apps would be the next hot way to release music.
Luckily for me, developers are living up to that prediction with all sorts of apps for interacting with music in ways that are impossible with a traditional release.
The most innovative iPhone app for distributing music I've seen this week is a 10-track iPhone app from the Grammy-nominated electronic artist Deadmau5, developed by an Irish company called Future Audio Workshop. It lets anyone with an iPhone, regardless of their level of experience, mix and remix every song in the album. This is only the first step: The company plans to apply the same approach to several other electronica albums as well.
Deadmau5's iPhone app ($3 on iTunes) lets you load any of 10 quantized Deadmau5 tracks into its dual-track playback engine, which works pretty much like professional DJ software while being easy enough for anyone to experiment with.
You can change BPM, control up to four concurrent effects, skip to the next phrase or back to the last one, loop a phrase, and cross fade between the two tracks, or from one to the next. When some albums cost $18 on CD, a $3 album that includes the ability to remix it each time you listen seems like a pretty good deal. And since the tool is so easy to use, it lets anyone DJ a dance party by plugging their iPhone or iPod Touch into a stereo and letting 'er rip.
Granted, a remixing approach like this works best with electronic music. But for music of any kind, the mobile phone app offers versatility that can make other portable formats look like wax cylinders by comparison.
An MP3 contains only audio and metadata, but an iPhone app can contain audio, video, images, software, lyrics, web links and games -- all of which are updatable from the server side. And rather than hovering around the 99-cents-per-song model found in the iTunes music store, bands and labels can charge anywhere from zero to $999.99 for an iPhone app, paying Apple approximately the same percentage cut as they would for a single song. Taken in total, the iPhone app store could lead to a wholesale change in the way music is consumed. To a small extent, it already has.
The A track in the Deadmau5 iPhone app is displayed above; here's the B track, where I have Flange and Delay effects activated. By sliding the Effect Control to the left or right, I can tweak each effect (works particularly well with Flange and Filter):
The Load function brings you to the album screen, where all 10 tracks are available for loading into either the A or B playback engine. All of them start at the same BPM; when you raise or lower the tempo during playback, both tracks automatically stay in sync:
Of course, not everyone has an iPhone. But as the app store model expands onto other mobile phone platforms, most mid-level-and-up cellphones should be capable of installing apps like this. When that happens, a plain old MP3 could seem just that: plain and old.
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