David Emery Online

iLike launches iPhone apps for Jeff Buckley, The Cribs, Sonic Youth…

4 August 2009

Back in May, music service iLike announced plans for a new B2B service that would create and launch iPhone applications for artists. More than 250 of them have gone live on the App Store in the last few days.

And they’re all rubbish. I really don’t see the point in such generic, assembly line production of mediocre apps – is anyone going to care? Wow, you can download an app to listen to 30s clips of an album (err, like you can in the iTunes app), see twitter updates from the band and see upcoming tour dates (insert ticket affiliate link here).

Doubly stupid considering the only way to get decent volume on the iTunes store is to get some promotion backing it up, either on the store/top 10 charts os somewhere else – how exactly are you going to promote an app when there are 249 near identical other versions?

I’m wondering whether it’s already too late to bother with music related iPhone app development – there’s just too much noise and rubbish to get lost in.