wax&wires

Depeche Mode Teams Up With iTunes For “Season Pass”

Depeche Mode’s new single Wrong, from the upcoming Sounds of the Universe

Well, I can’t say we didn’t see this one coming. Depeche Mode has signed on with iTunes to offer a subscription to fans in order to help generate some hype for their upcoming Sounds of the Universe album. This will be the first iTunes Pass dedicated to a specific artist and gives fans access to exclusive songs, remixes, videos and other content for $19.

I had mentioned briefly in an article a short while back that I was waiting for bands and record labels to harness the iPhone app as a means of cranking out exclusive content and generating more revenue.  We’ve now seen Kyte develop that exact service for various big time labels and artists. With an iPhone app, users could stream any content from a certain artist to their mobile, and the artist could update it from the back end on the fly. The main difference in this subscription and an app is that an app can update on the go since it’s just pulling data to stream from the artist’s server. The subscription downloads new content to iTunes, which is great since you get to keep the files, but then presents an extra laborious step in that you have to hook your iPhone in to your computer to load the content for mobile access. Nonetheless, this Depeche Mode subscription is another manifestation of the artist content app, and I’ll be more surprised if other artists don’t jump on the bandwaggon sooner than later.

Fans who purchase the Depeche Mode subscription will get exclusive content for 15 weeks leading up to the album release, and will automatically receive a copy of Sounds of the Universe when it comes out on April 15.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 4:32 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with catalog, depeche mode, itunes, season pass. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.