Let’s be honest: When it comes to finding new music in iTunes, Apple could be doing a better job. Their curators for the iTunes store are good, but unless you live indie rock or pop music, you’re not likely to find more than a couple new artists every year. And for some people, that average isn’t high enough. Beyond that, Apple doesn’t promote too many small independent artists. (When I was in a rock band, I didn’t have a hope of Apple promoting me.)
That being said, the great thing about the App Store is that there’s definitely an app for that (or, in this case, several apps). One of my favourites is Band of the Day — a great free universal app that helps you find upcoming independent artists and a few who are starting to break into the scene, with a new group or individual appearing every day. These guys are great curators, but an app is about more than an iTunes link — it’s also about content and presentation.
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Curating Great New Tunes Every Day
Band of the Day is a tremendous undertaking. Every day, there’s a new artist the shows up on the app’s radar. They’re not always totally underground — sometimes, somebody like the Decemberists or Jake Bugg slips through — but they always deserve at least a little bit of your attention. The bands that are featured in the app have serious merit and are way cooler than any band I could ever hope to be in. If you’re looking for a diverse genre selection, you’re in a relatively safe place here as they like to curate music from all over the place. You won’t find New Age Polka, which is probably a good thing, but you will find rock, indie, hip hop, blues and electronic music without much difficulty.
It’s easy to listen to some new songs every day, and it’s even easier to support them with a purchase.
It’s this sort of curation that led Apple to give them the App of the Year Runner-up award in 2011. Not ones to rest on their laurels, developer 955 Dreams has continued to polish beyond the point of simple curation. The app now includes a Related Artists section, which is also expertly-curated. This is the sort of app that requires hand selection; you don’t get results this good from a machine and it’s obvious that 955 Dreams has really fine-tuned how they do this.
Bonus Features
But 955 Dreams doesn’t stop at simple music curation. If they did, the app would simply present bands in list format. They’ve spent a lot of time working on the visuals and the content. But the content is what’s really striking here. Each artist gets a feature-length, magazine-style article, which is fantastic when they’re not as well-known. The articles are littered with videos and images, and a little media player sits on the bottom left of the app.
Every artist gets a highly interactive article.
In short, there’s a lot of stuff in here. There’s a Mix Tape feature that allows you to listen to hours of straight music without commercial interruption right in the app itself. It’s a great way to discover new music. Links within the app take you directly to iTunes to pick up music, but they’re never invasive; nobody grabs your finger and pushes it onto a Buy button. In fact, there isn’t much in the app to suggest that 955 Dream’s goal is to sell you music. They’re simply music lovers who want to expose you to as much of it as possible.
It’s easy to check out the artists on Band of the Day who are getting the most attention.
And from that perspective, the design is excellent. It’s filled to the brim with all sorts of useful features that any music lover would appreciate. Actually, if pressured to pick, the words I would use to describe Band of the Day is feature loaded. I cannot imagine a single music lover who wouldn’t enjoy having all these tools at his or her fingertips.
Cluttered Design
But any time you run into an app that has this much stuff in it, you’re bound to run into a couple of issues. My biggest is the design. I might run against the grain with this opinion, but I think that there’s too much going on with the design in this app. There are too many non-descriptive visual elements that take me to surprising places within the app (this is called Mystery Meat). It’s not the app is impossible to navigate, but that it’ll take a few trips to really get to know the roads.
I don’t know why these buttons aren’t easier to find or better-labelled.
Let me reiterate slightly so you don’t get the wrong idea: I don’t think that this app has too many features, and I don’t think it has a terrible design. I do feel, however, that the majority of its users simply won’t use most of the features because they won’t know they’re there. The Mix Tape, for example, is buried beneath a menu only accessible by tapping a head-shaped icon in the top right corner that looks a little alien-like (maybe I’m missing something, but I really don’t know what it’s supposed to be). I doubt that casual users of the app are going to bother checking out what that button does, and then they’ll miss out on the Mix Tape.
Obviously the coolest daily calendar ever.
Some elements of the UI are really well-handled, though. For example, the Mix Tape is great. Tapping on it starts it up immediately. It’s shuffled. You can either hit the Skip Track button on the bottom left or you can simply start swiping through album art to change the track, which is a nice and intuitive change from Apple’s stock Music app. If there were more little touches like that throughout Band of the Day, the design could be near-perfect, because they’re onto something. From a visual perspective, the app is pure eye candy. The calendar is really nice on a Retina display, and using pictures of the day’s artist as the calendar’s background is a really nice touch. For the record, the app looks breathes a lot easier on the iPad display — the smaller size of the iPhone just causes a lot of problems in that regard.
The Revenue Model
The streamed music is ad-free, but the app itself is littered with them. Every Artist Profile (read: article) is filled with ads. On some occasions, it’s an ad for another group. Often, it’s ads for clothing. Some of these ads are actually pretty nice, but they’re bizarrely intrusive when nothing else is. I don’t normally critique a revenue model, but it’s odd to me that there are so many ads in the articles compared to the rest of the app. Band of the Day is sitting on a trove of fantastic music you’ve likely never heard of, and although the Buy button is visible, they’re few and far between. I’d rather see more Buy buttons and fewer full-screen ads, but that’s just me.
Conclusion
Band of the Day has one incredible feature going for it: fantastic curation. I have yet to have a better music-finding experience with any other app in the App Store. 955 Dreams is clearly made up of music lovers and aficionados who are just happy to share what makes them want to get out of bed every morning, and that’s some of the strongest praise I can give.
The app is feature loaded, without a doubt, and that comes at the loss of some ease of use. That being said, a little exploring ought to set you straight, and in the year and a half that I’ve been using the app, they have slowly been improving the design. The revenue model will be a moot point for most users, and for others, the Mix Tape alone is going to be reason enough to give Band of the Day a shot. Highly recommended for anybody who needs more music in their iTunes library.