Enter the mobile music frontier—the age of the app is here—and you don’t need to be a developer to create your own iPhone app anymore. Here are three four platforms that enable artists to build their own custom mobile applications.
iLike artists can create an iPhone app through their iLike artist account. This looks like the the easiest, most basic, and inexpensive of the three options. Your app automatically integrates with the media content in your iLike artist profile. Currently it’ll cost you a one-time $195 to activate your app. You can choose to make your app free with the clause that iLike may place ads in it, or you can sell your app in a 50/50 split with iLike. View details and video demo.
Mobile Roadie is a flexible service geared for musician iPhone app creation. Their app features are interactive and viral. They include deep social network integration with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Fans have the ability to stream content, comment, upload photos, and purchase tickets and merchandise through the app. A band can sync their updates with their RSS feeds and social-network accounts, or they can update them through Mobile Roadie’s content management system. Their current basic pricing for musicians is $499 set-up + $29/month (covers the first 1,000 installs of the app each month—subsequent installs cost 1 cent each). Extras include “push notification” which uses geotagging to target fans in a specific region. If you opt for Mobile Roadie then please use our 10% discount referrer code virtual or this sign-up link. Watch video demo. View apps created with Mobile Roadie in the App Store.
Kyte is an online and mobile video platform providing on-demand content delivery and feature-rich application development for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Nokia devices. Their mobile app frameworks page details the key features, add-on modules, customizations, and monetization possibilities of their apps. The modules include RSS, Twitter, multimedia chat, content streaming, downloads, comments/ratings, fan media uploads, events, location-aware services, games, fan club sign-ups, and mCommerce. Kyte no doubt offers an immense customizable feature set and it is presumably more expensive than the aforementioned alternatives. You have to inquire for exact pricing, but I believe that they charge on a monthly basis for their service at different levels based on features and usage. Update—I received an email response from Kyte with the following details: Kyte iPhone Applications are available as an add-on component to the Kyte Platform and cost an additional monthly fee of $600 per app. The Kyte Platform tiers start at $500/month (plus set-up) and go up into the thousands. Kyte is a power solution for musicians with a massive fanbase.
Did I mention that these services handle the submission process to the Apple iTunes Store for you? Please share how you’re using these for your band etc. Plus, what other platforms am I missing? Update—we were informed about a new 4th platform via the comment section below. Here’s the 411:
MobBase is an iPhone app creation platform designed for musicians and brought to you by the collaborative remix community MixMatchMusic. MobBase launched today and its options enabling musicians to connect with their mobile mob include streaming audio, RSS, Twitter integration, videos via YouTube, photo albums via Picasa, artist info, events, ticketing, and merch. It looks affordable too—their current pricing for free apps is $20 set-up + $15/month (covers the first 500 installs each month—an additional 1,000 installs costs an extra $5). For paid apps, the set-up fee is the same, the monthly rate starts at $20/month, and you keep all the revenue from the sales. Digital distribution company IODA has partnered with MobBase as the app solution for its artists and labels. More detailed coverage is at RWW. View apps created with MobBase in the App Store.
