Songpier Lets Anyone Make a Music App in Minutes
- By Eliot Van Buskirk
- June 6, 2011 |
- 6:01 pm |
- Categories: music
Apps might be the flavor of the minute, but they’re no passing fad. If you think it’s nuts that your phone, tablet and soon car and television will run apps, just wait until your refrigerator and air conditioner get in on the action.
If you’re in a band (or even if you’re not but have managed to record some music) it’s now possible for you to create an app in minutes that anyone can install on their phone or tablet.
Pierlane’s Songpier, released for public beta Monday, walks even the most Luddite of drummers through the process of creating a web-based app for Apple iOS or Android. (Songpier also works with other smartphones, but was designed specifically with iOS and Android smartphones and tablets in mind.)
Songpier apps are web apps, as opposed to apps in the traditional sense of being downloaded from the iTunes or Android app stores. However, users can access these apps the same way they access other apps — by tapping a neat-looking icon on their home screens — and they feel just like regular apps. They load fast, perform responsively and include an artist’s song, pictures, events, merchandise, a link to their website and more — just about everything you would expect from a standard music app from a band.
Artists can add lyrics for their Songpier songs, and use the apps to sell records, T-shirts and other merchandise by entering simple titles and URLs.
We know this because we just made one this morning. You just enter the elements (songs, buy links, your label, description, genre, release date, influences, album art/title, background image and so on), previewing them on a mocked-up smartphone or tablet to see how the end result will look.
The resulting app works in regular or landscape mode, and you even get to upload your own app icon, to which SongPier adds the trademark rounded corners, so that it looks great on the user’s home screen — although, because the resulting app is a web app that runs within the browser, rather than a native iOS or Android app, users will have to create a bookmark on their homescreens in order to tap on the icon to launch it.
Luckily, the app instructs the user on how to do this the first time they visit your app’s web location (screenshot to the below left), but it’s not as seamless as installing the app from the iTunes or Android app store.
If the artist wants it to, a SongPier app can integrate with Facebook and Twitter so that when they enter news, pictures and tour dates, it can automatically tweet them out or post them on your Facebook wall in addition to pushing them out to whoever has the app installed, so that SongPier can act as your “post once, view everywhere” social media hub.
In case you missed it, here’s the app I made for my old side project, Planet Vegas. To view it on a mobile phone, tablet or computer, visit http://songpier.com/planet?vegas/ or scan the QR code to the right.
See? It works — and again, I made this in minutes (sorry, Mobile Roadie).
Pierlane will soon announce “a partnership with a major U.S. company” in the coming month, according to what Pierland spokesman Wolfgang Senges told Evolver.fm. He added to the mystery by suggesting that it’s not a label or Apple.
Any guesses on what this mystery company could be? Send them our way.
See Also:
- Best, Worst Artist Apps for Fans With iPhones
- SXSW: ShareSquare’s ‘Most Scanned Bands’ Contest Points to Next-Generation Artist Marketing
- Viinyl Explains Why Each Song Should Have Its Own URL
- SXSW 2011: ‘Clickable’ QR Code Posters for the Win
- How and Why Every Song Can Be an App
- Why Drop 50K? Artists, Labels Build Their Own Apps For Less
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