It seems that all the hype coming from the recent Jay-Z Magna Carta Holy Grail album release has dissipated now that that everyone has actually seen what all the hubbub was about. Most of the heat from the release came from the fact that the artist made a deal with Samsung where the company purchased one million digital albums that they delivered to many of their smartphones via an app. Jay-Z then began a fight (that he eventually won) to have those albums counted as sales on the Billboard charts.
The bigger story soon became that many Samsung/Jay-Z app users felt violated because of the amount of private information that was necessary to download the app in the first place, including their physical location, their phone number, and data about their phone calls and email. The users were then asked to sign into the app via Facebook FB -1.1% or Twitter, and send out a post or tweet about doing so if they wanted to unlock the lyrics to a song.
Jay-Z’s Magna Carta app fiasco is yet another illustration as to why album apps are destined to fail as a genre. Want some specific reasons? Here you go.
1. There are simply too many apps on the market. The gold rush for app treasure is over. How many apps do you have on your smartphone or tablet right now? How many do you actually use? The fact of the matter is that album apps get lost among the user apps, and they’ll be among the first to get ditched after they’re not used for a while, especially if the few songs that you like are available on another music library that you listen to.
2. Apps are not a convenient way to consume music. There may be some novelty the first time you use an app to take a listen, especially if there’s some additional content offered, but if you’re like most people, you just want to hear your favorite songs on the album then move on to different material. An app prevents that smooth transition to and from other music though. As far as the value added material, after you’ve seen it once, how many times are you going to go back for another look? Maybe never, I bet, just like with DVDs.
3. Developing an app is not a trivial pursuit. It takes time to create any kind of solid working app, especially one with value-added sophistication. Add that to the fact that you probably can’t do much of the development work until the album is completed (since you might not know which songs will be on it), and you can increase the release time by up to six months. In this fast moving world of Music 3.0 that we now live in, that’s a lifetime. An artist can easily blow by the window of opportunity by waiting for the app to be finished.
4. User privacy is an increasing concern. Blame it on Edward Snowden, Facebook, Wikileaks or the NSA Prism project, but we’re now all sensitized to our personal online privacy. Just how much of that privacy do you want to give up to an app of any kind? On the other hand, if you’re an artist, that info is exactly what you want in trade for your app. Jay-Z and Samsung got away with it once. Would they again?
5. It’s now a singles world. We see in almost every market around the world that album sales are decreasing while single song sales are soaring. How many albums that you already own can you honestly say had enough great songs to make it worth the purchase? It’s the rare artist that legitimately has enough good music to fill 40+ minutes of our lives these days.
So lets quell the album app frenzy. The world does not need another app of any kind that doesn’t fulfill a particular need, and it’s hard to quantify the “need” for a album app. How about we use this as a criteria before we develop any app in the future; If it’s not something that you might want to use every day, then don’t build it.
