AT&T Tech Support 360Interactive albums coming to iTunes
Coming soon to iPhone and iPod Touch: albums as applications.
(Credit: Apple)There's been a lot of speculation lately about whether iTunes is a boon or burden to album sales.
Kid Rock has sold more than 1.7 million copies of his latest album, Rock and Roll Jesus, with no iTunes presence at all. And last week, Warner Bros. pulled Estelle's new album from iTunes in the U.S. in hopes of spurring physical sales. (The plan appears to have failed miserably.)
Apple is striking back before this scattered practice turns into a trend. According to Music Week, the company is working with alternative rock band Snow Patrol on an interactive iPhone/iPod Touch application for its next album that will include more album art, videos, and--most important--lyrics, which are still way too hard to find online. (The exceptions are those pop-up-infested and largely inaccurate lyrics sites that show up in Google search.)
I hope this becomes standard practice for new releases--one of the greatest losses in the move from LP to CD to digital files was the gradual elimination of lyric sheets.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure.
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The other option is to stick with CDs, which is my current choice.
Additional album art, lyrics synced with the music (kind of karaoke style), info about the everyone related to the album. Pretty cool stuff. I always wondered why more albums didn't offer this type of thing.