It is sort of an eye-opener to see how musicians go about exploiting the iPhone's popularity and its many users' readiness to spend (small sums) of money to acquire their favorites' gadgets.
Companies like iLike made it their business to provide templates enabling musicians to have their own iPhone application ready and available in a jiffy. The result is a dump of uniformly pimped promo-apps, like the (free) André Rieu application. On the opposite end of the same line there is the amazingly rich (and also free) [ NiN : access ] community tool, which gives streaming access to pretty much the complete Nine Inch Nails catalogue and to an evolving database of fan-made remixes. Superior in content and quality as it may be, the NiN application remains more or less a mobile version of the NiN website and, like the iLike's, is primarily a marketing tool.
A step ahead are the re-mix applications: here the artist's music comes in a form that allows listeners to create their proper mix-version. Interesting and fun as these apps may be, the idea that the variable, re-mixable, format will offer an ailing record industry the urgently needed buoy to keep them from foundering, seems a bit farfetched. The number of available re-mix applications is still relatively low, but there is at least one company offering artists a ready-to-use iPhone remix-app template. No less than David Bowie teamed up with iKlax, who released a moonlanding anniversary remix-app of his 1969 classic Space Oddity.
Though the prospect of remix apps giving access to much of yesterday's and tomorrow's popular and other music recordings as a collection of separate stem tracks is exciting, and might profoundly change the way we listen, it does not alter so much the way in which we think about music.
For there still is the "music".
And then there is the "app".
The app and the music are two.
This is not yet the future of music.
The future of music is other. In the future of music the app and the music will be one. As they are, for example, in Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers' Bloom.
next: "Reality, Joe!"
