David Emery OnlineMobile Music
8 February 2011
As a general rule I try to avoid linking to work things on here; I’m well aware that simply by exposure I’m inherently biased, so I try and leave it to spread by itself. However, once in a while we do something that I’m really proud of that’s worth drawing attention to. This is one of those things:
The elevator pitch is simple: to listen to a stream of the new Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx record, you need to take your smartphone within range of a number of ‘transmitters’ dotted around the world. If you’re within 250 meters or so you get to hear the album; any further away and you can’t.
The concept comes out of two things that have been floating around in my head for a while: how to tie music into location in some way, and how to represent the value that an album stream has.
Location is obviously a fairly hot topic at the moment, thanks to the rise of smart phones with built in GPS. I’d originally been circling the idea of making people go to a specific location to get a free mp3 but what we ended up with is far more interesting then that; the album has its roots in the London pirate radio scene so tying the location concept into an album stream was a no brainer idea as soon as someone suggested it.
Similarly, making people get out of their houses and go to a specific place seems like a more reasonable value exchange for an album stream then the traditional freebee model.
The tech behind it all is pretty nifty as well. We made the choice to implement this as a web app, rather then a native app, so that we could target more people (not just iPhone users) and also avoid the high costs and long turnaround time associated with native apps. To that end, we use all sorts of HTML5 goodies including geolocation to do the main heavy lifting of figuring out where people are (err, obviously), and the new audio tag to play the track (via SoundManager2).
That last bit actually tripped us up on android, as it turns out there’s a bug in the implementation of the audio tag which means it doesn’t work (I’d classify that a pretty serious bug); sadly the solution is either to upgrade to 2.3 (if you can), or install flash (if you can). Far from ideal, and not very inspiring for us to keep on trying to make our mobile sites android compatible.
Other then that though it’s quite liberating to be able to use things like CSS animation, rotation and similar without issue if you’re targeting modern mobile browsers; hopefully it won’t be long until we can do the same on the desktop.
All this wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of Tom and Naomi who did all the coding and designing. We’re also planning to extend it out further in the coming days, allowing you to check-in with Twitter at a transmitter when your listening, which will add your avatar to a list of recent listeners – I really like the idea of being able to listen to an album, and be able to see who else near you has also listened to it.
The things that are achievable now with fairly simple technology open some really interesting new possibilities.