The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App
February 19th, 2009 | Published in wires | 1 Comment
I found this over at wired.com and thought it was pretty interesting.
Remember that song Peaches from way back when? What about Lump, or my personal favorite, Dune Buggy? I can recall my Jr. High P.E. class having the Presidents of the United States of America album on heavy rotation while we stair-stepped our way to being fit.
Now Prez’s frontman Dave Dederer is a VP at Melodeo, the makers of nuTsie, a software app that lets you stream iTunes playlists onto your PC, mobile device or facebook profile. Melodeo has now released a $3 app for the iPhone and iPod touch that lets you stream 4 Presidents of the United States of America albums, the 4 that the Prez own the rights to for themselves. The application also includes rare and exclusive material that the band can update from their end, and your phone will automatically pick up.
This presents an interesting marketing strategy, as it filters money directly to the band from the app, but undoubtedly detracts from album sales on iTunes or other MP3 retailers. Why spend $40 on 4 albums when you could stream all of them for just $3? While you do have to be connected to the internet to hear the albums, unlike if you owned the mp3s themselves, with 3G ever-expanding, I don’t see that being too much of a problem; especially with the added incentive of exclusive content that the band could update at any point in the future. We’ve already seen Pandora take off with music streaming, so clearly listeners don’t mind needing to connect to the net to listen to their music for the most part.
I think that as more bands implement apps like this, it presents a great opportunity to heighten the level of connection between the fans and the band. Imagine a band that uploads tracks of their weekly rehearsals, quick audio notes to fans or other things of the like to purchasers of their iPhone app. The band makes a little extra money from the app, the fan gets to name-drop a bit more about some exclusive content, everybody wins… except iTunes who would only get a small cut of the app price rather than a big cut of the $10 album price.
I could even see record labels starting apps and piping new artists to fans to rate, so that they could better judge who was catching on.
How can you harness the expansion of net availability to promote your band?
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August 5th, 2009at 11:27 am(#)
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