It seems that the hottest trend in R&B is to have your own iPhone app. With T Pain’s ‘I Am T-Pain’ riding high in the App Store chart, Usher has just launched his own streaming music app. It might have given a shot of credibility in the arm of the company that made it too.
Usher’s Top 100 features, funnily enough, one hundred of Usher’s favourite songs for fans to stream over the air with links to buy any that appeal to them.
At $2.99 and featuring big-name artists like James Brown and Michael Jackson there’s no doubt that this is a bargain for anyone who cares about Usher enough to explore his taste in music. With all that music streaming over the phone’s data connection (Wifi, 3G or EDGE) it will be a battery hog though.
The app comes from podcasting network Wizzard Media and Melodeo, a company that specialises in producing the iPhone app equivalent of those cheap compilation CDs you can buy in petrol stations. Following the same ‘Stream the playlist or buy songs if you like’ model, most of Melodeo’s ‘nuTsie‘ apps have names like ‘Top 100 Rock Songs of the 70s’ and ‘The Salvation Army Christmas Songs’. They probably shift a few copies but they hardly have the ‘cool’ factor. By slapping Usher’s name on this new app Melodeo should tap into a whole new market who wouldn’t have touched their apps otherwise.
When it comes to innovation, T-Pain’s app is much more interesting. A collaboration with Antares, the company behind the popular Autotune music production tool, it allows users to sing in T-Pain’s trademark robotic style.
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