Why your band doesn't need an iPhone app

Andrew Meade / The Brunswickan  

From the Tubes

I have a serious beef with marketing and PR outfits all over (mostly) North America right now. It has recently come to my attention that record labels have started releasing iPhone applications for (in some cases) almost every band on their label, big and small.

Bad iPhone applications.

These are apps that, I’m sure, make other iPhone app developers cry while they toss and turn, losing countless hours of sleep on a nightly basis.

The basis of my argument, despite what you are about to read, is not entirely against the concept of developing an iPhone app for a band. It’s more about the premise of ignoring progress some developers.

Why is it that a large number of bands and/or their associated staff feel to need to exploit the most abstract, useless and downright impractical methods of communicating to the masses?

Before I get too far ahead of myself: why is an iPhone application for one specific band a poor concept? Let’s look at an app recently released for a “five-piece metalcore band from Burlington, Ontario.” It takes videos of the band from YouTube, tweets about it from Twitter, entries from the its blog, songs by the band from its website and the band’s wall feed from Facebook. Oh, and it tries really hard to get you to purchase the band’s music.

This all sounds well and fine if you listen to one band. But what happens when you diversify a little bit? Toss in some punk rock, some jazz, and - god-forbid - some country rock?

You, my friend, have a lot of apps to download. And guess what? Every time one of those bands decides to write a blog entry or - worse - one of their fans decides to gush all over their wall, you receive an instant, push notification of the event.

Man, this is a great idea! Oh wait, people don’t listen to the same bands all day every day.

Four years ago, major browsers incorporated the use of RSS - “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary” for those who don’t like cool and slightly vague acronyms. The point of this technology, as defined by beloved Wikipedia, is to “publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.” Say - it’s already getting fairly easy to see where I’m going with this here now, isn’t it?

I know at some point along the line you’re going to discover my love for Google and its products, but seriously, have you ever heard of Google Reader? Used Mozilla Thunderbird for more than a day? Played with Live Bookmarks in Firefox? Then you know what RSS is. It essentially lets you subscribe to RSS feeds for anything on the Internet that you like - YouTube channels, Twitter timelines, Facebook news feeds, blogs of any kind, even recipes. Even better, it’s painfully easy (and, in most cases, free) to set up your own RSS feed

So whether you’re say, I don’t know, a band, a podcaster or a poet, you can publish yourself all over the world and allow people to subscribe to your self-publication for free, without hiring someone to write an app for you.

And if you’re someone interested in subscribing to one of those things, you can pick and choose the feeds you want and syndicate them to a client of your choosing - whether it be Google Reader or an app like NetNewsWire for iPhone.

Or you can ignore everything I’ve just said and be one of dozens of musicians who have already shelled out big bucks for an app.