Ten Most Popular Artist/Musician iPhone App Strategies Reviewed

Chris Terschluse of the blog Interactive:Incite posted a review of the most popular musician iPhone apps available today. Some seem to offer enough value-add to justify their existence, others seem to miss the mark totally. What I think Chris understands, and what I think is valuable about this article, is that everything you do in your music career must be value-adding. This seems to go without saying, but then why do we have so many artists hopping on bandwagons [insert pun here] that they have no business being on (read: vinyl, iPhone apps, trying to build proprietary social networks, etc.).

Best Practices

The apps that I consider to be best in class offer a value to the user that would encourage continuous use over time in terms of community, content, and direct artist contact.

Community:

The Akon, Lady Gaga, and Soulja Boy apps are all powered by Kyte ( an online video-streaming community).  This allows for some really great things such as user rated videos, live chat rooms, and exclusive mobile video streamed directly from the artists.

The DMB app allows users to sign in with their Twitter account allowing for easy communication with band and the fan community.  The app also allows users to upload user-generated-content such as photos from concerts and contains a fan chat room.

Content:

The Wilco, Death Cab for Cutie, and Black Lips apps provide streaming of full tracks and albums on the app.  The app will also function while audio is streamed (a feature that is not found with the iTunes 30sec samples).

Santana offers guitar lessons via the mobile app provide something of true value to Santana fans.

The Wilco application has an extensive selection of podcasts from the band.

Arists-to-Fan:

The Dead and DMB applications offer exclusive content from the band such as Tweets during live shows.

Continue reading the rest of the article over at Chris’ blog, where he goes into a little more detail about each app: Ten Most Popular Artist/Musician iPhone App Strategies Reviewed

What artist apps have you personally used? Do you consider them value-adding or a waste of time? What is working and what is not? What features do you want as a fan? Is creating an iPhone app (or any other gadget, widget, gizmo) for your music a distraction from more important things?