.Evolving Music.

It’s been quite a busy week over at MixMatchMusic HQ, where the MobBase team has released 28 new iPhone apps in just two days! Amongst all the fuss going on about “cookie cutter” iPhone apps earlier this week, the release of this batch of apps makes one thing pretty clear: MobBase apps are much more than just web-views and RSS feeds. All in all, there are now 134 MobBase apps in iTunes!

This batch of apps was made by musicians and music companies from around the world, and features a variety of eclectic content for you to enjoy. The apps turned out really well, and as you can see below, they aren’t cookie cutter at all — each MobBase app can have its own unique image, look and feel.  Check out all the new MobBase apps here.

MobBase is again proving the market for iPhone applications that connect musicians with fans, more than doubling the number of apps released in just the past month. MobBase is the new service that makes it easy for musicians and music companies to create, launch and manage their own, custom iPhone applications.

“The MobBase adoption curve is getting steep, fast,” said Charles Feinn, CEO and co-founder of MixMatchMusic, MobBase’s developer. “It took about 90 days to launch the first 50 apps and just 30 days to get to 107. It’s more clear with every day that artists are adopting mobile apps to help build their careers, and that they choose MobBase as the fast, easy and inexpensive way to get their own app.”

MobBase is a low cost way for musicians to share music, photos, videos, tweets, news, information about shows, merchandise and other content with fans on their mobile devices. MobBase apps are priced for starving artists and also artists who remember what it is like to starve, with many artists paying as little as $0.50 a day for their own custom iPhone app.

Prominent artists including Pepper and Everclear are among the bands that have built and launched their own MobBase apps. Feinn said growth is also coming from long tail artists, such as Tribal Seeds, Cash Lewis, NatStar the King, Radagun, Supreme The Eloheem, and indie label, Let It Burn Records. The MobBase platform has also been used to create the official iPhone app for Showtime’s Nurse Jackie soundtrack.

MobBase is a great solution for established acts,” Feinn said. “It’s also a fantastic solution for artists with small but devoted followings who are making music for the love of music. The extremely low price, the super ease of use and the ability to customize it to reflect your own look and feel makes it perfect for artists in the long tail.”

Music distribution powerhouse, IODA, and indie labels including Silverback Music/Controlled Substance Sound Labs, SMC Recordings, Welk Music Group, Vanguard Records, Sugar Hill Records, Town Thizzness, Red Bull Records, Sargent House, and 429 Records are offering MobBase apps and promoting MobBase to their artists.

Feinn said there have been more than 60,000 installs of MobBase apps by fans.

Some great news straight from the MixMatchMusic garage (aka HQ)! MobBase is proving the market for iPhone applications that connect musicians with their fans, with more than 50 applications launched since the service debuted this past November.  MobBase is the new service that makes it easy for musicians and music companies to create, launch and manage their own, custom iPhone applications.

“The Pepper iPhone app is helping us stay to connected with our fans 24/7 and the connection has been amazing,” said Bret Bollinger, a founder of Hawaii’s premier rock band. “We’ve seen a huge influx of new fans and have been able to reconnect with long time fans through our app’s integration with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and many other sites since its launch.”

Pepper fans have installed the band’s MobBase iPhone app more than 25,000 times since the start of 2010, and have streamed Pepper’s music more than 500,000 times through the app. The Pepper app was featured in iTunes’ “What’s Hot” section in mid-January.

“For Pepper it starts with great music.  They are also a great example of a band using all of the tools at their disposal to connect and engage with fans online and on their mobile devices,” said Charles Feinn, CEO and co-founder of MixMatchMusic, MobBase’s developer. “A custom iPhone app is an important part of that mix, and key to the equation that results in engaged fans buying more concert tickets, band merchandise and music.”

MobBase is a low cost way for musicians to share music, photos, videos, tweets, news, information about shows, merchandise and other content with fans on their mobile devices.

Bands like Everclear, RX Bandits, Rebelution, the Jacka, and Jump Smokers are finding it easy to create their own custom iPhone apps, and easy to add, manage and update content in real time through the MobBase dashboard.

IODA, one of the world’s leading digital distribution companies, is promoting MobBase as its premier solution for iPhone applications.

“We have had a great response thus far from our clients to MobBase’s iPhone apps,” said Adam Rabinovitz, vice president of marketing at IODA. “Mobbases’s web interface enables real time updating which is great for touring artists and busy, on-the-go label managers. We’ve also been testing the product ourselves with the IODA Promonet app and have been very pleased with the results.”

Additionally, indie labels Silverback Music/Controlled Substance Sound Labs, SMC Recordings, Welk Music Group, Vanguard Records, Sugar Hill Records, Town Thizzness, Red Bull Records, Sargent House, and 429 Records are also offering MobBase apps and are promoting it to their artists.

MobBase is priced for starving artists and also artists who remember what it was like to starve, with many artists paying as little as $0.50 a day for their own app.

HOT!

It’s official! Pepper is what’s hot. The newest addition to the “What’s Hot” list in the iTunes App Store is Pepper’s app, which is powered by MixMatchMusic’s MobBase. Congrats to Pepper!

Pepper’s app has been installed over 12,000 times in the last week! Fans from all over the world are now connected to Pepper through their mobile devices, including fans from Japan, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland, Great Britain. Korea, Russia, Germany, China, France, Taiwan. Turkey, and Italy.

MobBase is a new service for musicians that makes it easy for them to create, launch and manage their own, custom iPhone applications. For as little as $0.50 a day, MobBase will enable musicians to share music, photos, videos, tweets, news, blog posts, information about shows, merchandise and other content with fans on their mobile devices.

To check out the 47 MobBase apps available for download in iTunes, including Pepper’s, click here!

It’s been a busy few days for MixMatchMusic, as 34 MobBase iPhone apps are now live in iTunes! The apps turned out rather pretty, and they include a lot of great content that covers a wide variety of genres and styles. More importantly, artists will be updating their apps using the MobBase dashboard, so things will be kept super fresh! So what are you waiting for? Visit iTunes or check out the list below to download your favorite artists’ MobBase app!

Everclear: http://apps.mobbase.com/everclear
Ioda Promonet: http://apps.mobbase.com/ioda
Pepper: http://apps.mobbase.com/pepper
Rx Bandits: http://apps.mobbase.com/rxbandits
Greg Laswell: http://apps.mobbase.com/greglaswell
Zion-I: http://apps.mobbase.com/zioni
the Jacka: http://apps.mobbase.com/jacka
Rebelution: http://apps.mobbase.com/rebelution
Easy Star All Stars: http://apps.mobbase.com/easystar
Town Thizzness: http://apps.mobbase.com/thizz
Silverback Artist Management/Controlled Substance Sound Labs: http://apps.mobbase.com/sbsound
Killer Mike: http://apps.mobbase.com/killermike
Shanghai Restoration Project: http://apps.mobbase.com/srp
Jennie Laws: http://apps.mobbase.com/jennielaws
Throw Me the Statue: http://apps.mobbase.com/tmts
Black Gold: http://apps.mobbase.com/blackgold
The Blakes: http://apps.mobbase.com/blakes
Big Light: http://apps.mobbase.com/biglight
Enzyme Dynamite: http://apps.mobbase.com/enzyme
Eoin Harrington: http://apps.mobbase.com/eoinharrington
El Desayuno: http://apps.mobbase.com/desayuno
Life Love Misery: http://apps.mobbase.com/lifelovemisery
Gavroche: http://apps.mobbase.com/gavroche
Dee: http://apps.mobbase.com/deecrazylove
Kent Welton: http://apps.mobbase.com/kentwelton
The High Five Revival: http://apps.mobbase.com/thehighfiverevival
The Sleeping: http://apps.mobbase.com/thesleeping
Wink Sound: http://apps.mobbase.com/winksound
Joey Lenze: http://apps.mobbase.com/joeylenze
Street Credit: http://apps.mobbase.com/streetcredit
Roy Tal Music: http://apps.mobbase.com/roytalmusic
Kick Drum Decade Improv: http://apps.mobbase.com/kddimprov
My Boxing Fans: http://apps.mobbase.com/myboxingfans
Home Spa Goddess: http://apps.mobbase.com/ihsg

Yesterday, MixMatchMusic launched MobBase, a new service that makes it easy and inexpensive for musicians to create, launch and manage their own, custom iPhone apps. While a lot of information about MobBase has already been revealed, and you can now visit MobBase to start creating your app, there are some things that we would like to point. Here are 10 things that you may not know about your MobBase iPhone app:

Create your app for free
You can register for a MobBase account and create an iPhone app for free. When you’re ready to launch, you pay a $20 activation fee to submit your app to Apple for approval. Before submission, a MobBase team member will walk you through your app to make sure everything looks good.

Your app is a blank canvas
It’s your app, and it can have your unique image, look, and feel. The MobBase dashboard gives you a blank canvas to project your artistic vision — select from seven different layouts, arrange the features however you like, upload a loading image, upload background and button images, choose your title bar color, and select color themes. Don’t worry, you can change the app’s layout and design as often as you like.

Lyrics, album artwork and credits
Too much of the album experience has been lost in the post CD/Vinyl world, until now. With a MobBase iPhone app, you can give your fans the full album experience by adding lyrics to your songs, additional artwork for your releases, and even credits.

Fans can add videos too
In addition to featuring YouTube videos and piping in your entire YouTube channel, your fans can add video content to your app. Just pick a few tags for fans to use when uploading their videos to YouTube, and these videos will appear in your app. The tags can be as specific as you want, so if you want fan footage from a specific show or if you want fans to make their own music videos for your song, just hook them up with the tags!

There’s a whole lot of tweeting going on
Twitter is not something we take casually, and neither should you.  Add as many Twitter accounts as you want to your app, whether it be one official band account, or the Twitter accounts for all the members, even the drummer:) Then, track the buzz by piping in all the “@” mentions of your accounts. You can even have conversations with your fans about specific topics, by adding hashtags — add as many hashtags as you want, and we’ll create special sections for them.

All the music you want, from our servers or yours.
You can stream as much music as you want from your app, whether it be your full catalog or just your new single. And, you can mix up what music is playable by making songs inactive or adding new songs. To add music to your app, you can either upload the MP3s to MobBase, or you can paste in a link and stream the music from your own servers.

Update your app on the fly
After you launch your app, you can update it as often as you want, at no additional charge. And, only a few of the changes will require resubmission to Apple, which means most your changes will happen right away. Some of your updates will need to be made through the MobBase dashboard (adding new music, feeds, or featured videos; or changing the layout/customization), while others (all the feed-based content you provide, like the news, blog, shows, videos, photos, etc) will happen automatically.

Hands-on support, if you need it.
While we’ve built MobBase so that you can easily create your app through the MobBase dashboard without any programming or technical skills, we’re here to help. If you want our hands-on support while making your app, you can purchase 3 months of premium support for $200. Premium support includes unlimited phone and email support while building your app; exclusive features such as multiple news feeds, integration with your mailing list/street team, and extra content; a complete app audit that will identify ways to make your app more effective; and unlimited walk-throughs of your app before it is launched.

Photos Galore
You can add as many photos albums as you want to your MobBase app, each with an unlimited amount of photos.

To sell or not to sell?
It’s your app, and you can decide if you want to give it away for free in iTunes, or if you want to sell the app. If you sell the app, you can name the price and we’ll handle all the administrative logistics for a nominal monthly fee. After Apple takes its 30% cut, you keep the rest — we don’t rev share with you!

It is well known that over the last 10 years the barriers to making music have been shattered by highly effective, and cheap, music making software. Musicians now have many great resources when it comes to digital studio software and online collaboration and production tools. And, as music making technology continues to spread and becomes easier to use, even fans have entered the music making process by remixing and collaborating with their favorite artists.

The next step in the evolution of music production very well may be mobile music making, and while many mobile music tools have been released in the last several years, IK Multimedia’s GrooveMaker may be the most effective. After the success of their first four applications released last August, IK Multimedia has put out two new versions of their GrooveMaker music production apps. The new GrooveMaker Techno and GrooveMaker Trance add to IKM’s existing genre collection of House, Hip-Hop, and Club. If you get the itch to make some beats on-the-go, these apps allow users to create and share full length, non-stop tracks in real-time, perfect for DJing, remixing, or creating multimedia soundtracks. Pretty sweet, eh?

The GrooveMaker apps contain advanced remixing software that allows for control over eight stereo loop tracks. Users can pull from GrooveMaker’s extensive library of high sound-quality drum, bass, bass drums, lines, pads, percussion and effects loops, and loops are easily arranged by dragging and dropping. GrooveMaker’s randomization feature lets users create millions of possible grooves with just one touch. Once a user is done with their jam, tracks can be saved, previewed, recalled, and exported as .WAV files to a computer through a Wi-Fi network.

While GrooveMaker Techno and GrooveMaker Trance are available in the iTunes App Store for $9.99, IK Multimedia has given us a few copies to give out for free! The first four people to tweet out “I dig the GrooveMaker iPhone app and @EvolvingMusic!” will get a free copy of the GrooveMaker app. Or check out GrooveMaker’s fully functional basic version, available for free on iTunes. And to check out audio demos, visit GrooveMaker’s website.

Curious to learn more about music making on the iPhone? Read this.

Hey musicians, have something to sell? You know, like… an album? Enter Cartfly. Cartfly lets you set up a store widget to sell your product (jewelery, music, art etc). It is painfully simple, almost free, and you can post it in all those special places.

Capitalizing on the ubiquity of social networks, Cartfly is enabling retailers “… to establish a point of presence right inside profile pages and other sites” according to cofounder Joshua Manley. Even if you’ve got your songs on iTunes, CD Baby and wherever else, one more potential revenue stream can’t hurt, right? Slap it on your Facebook and show the world your goods! Oh, and the widget uses Flex, which gets the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) junkies all excited. Want to know more? Follow them on Twitter.

About a year ago I examined a Wired article looking at the head of the Universal Music Group, Doug Morris, and his attempts to move against the current of technology that was slowly eroding his old-timer’s hold on music distribution. My how times have changed. Not only has UMG joined forces with the other three major labels to eradicate DRM on iTunes purchases, now they’re actively joining the swelling ranks looking for digital solutions to real-life problems.

UMG, home of artists like 50 Cent and Lil’ Wayne, is always looking for new ways to interact with fans and bring their favorite artists to them in ways that are both exciting and relevant. Because of this and the potential they see in the company, UMG has joined forces with Kyte, an emerging web start-up that is aiming to fill a niche not currently serviced by YouTube: live video streams.

UMG is hoping that this will prompt massive coverage and interest in short live broadcasts from the backstage dressing rooms, the road, clips of shows or anywhere else these artists might find themselves wanting to reach out and directly connect to fans visually. It takes away the overhead of big-budget, high quality videos that need to be processed and uploaded and replaces it with a web-based streamlined idea that brings the live video straight to the viewer.

Of course, given that these video streams are live, it could become difficult if not impossible to control the content. I’m wondering how long it’ll take for UMG to take issue with that… This could also be a shot across the bow of YouTube as the four majors actively begin renegotiating licensing agreements with Google’s video baby.

With 2008 and all the music that came with it steadily speeding away in our rear view, I got to thinking a lot about what we did and didn’t see last year in the musical world, and what’s coming. When it comes down to it, 2008 was largely defined by some of the musical trends we saw, the continuing struggle over DRM and the ever growing attempts to market, brand and distribute music in ways that utilize multiple media and social platforms.

Musically, there was a greater push towards mash-ups (AmpLive Interview) and punk fueled Indie rock. Bands like Fall Out Boy and Bloc Party among many others kept driving guitars, sometimes melancholy lyrics and music that’s in your face in terms of pace at the forefront of the radio mainstream. Hip-Hop continued its usual pond-like trend: scum on the surface, beautiful water underneath with “artists” like T.I., T-Pain and Flo-rida topping the charts while rappers like Akrobatik, eLZhi and Black Milk continued struggling to boost their word of mouth. The line between Hip-Hop and Pop was continually blurred as radio Rap brought in more Rock and World music sounds into their songs.

We saw Kanye West rebound from a personally disastrous year to re-vamp his sound with 808s and Heartbreak, and we saw Guns ‘N Roses dig themselves out of a nearly 20 year grave to release the much anticipated Chinese Democracy album, something that many fans thought they’d never hear. Of course, most fans expected to hear either a new Eminem album (Relapse) or the long awaited and highly anticipated Detox album from Dr. Dre, and they got neither.

The DRM battle raged on in 2008, and in even just the beginning weeks of ‘09 we’ve seen a nice movement in the area. For most of 2008, the IFPI (2) and the RIAA battled downloaders, both large and small, in court. Looking for lost compensation, they took to trial serial filesharers and spent massive amounts of time and money scaring college kids into settling out of court for fear of an expensive and punitive sentence against them. In the end, these efforts were largely useless, and in my mind, a joke, as they claimed to be fighting for the artists, while we all pretty much know how little the labels show the artists from individual song downloads.

The record industry spent months wringing their hands over lost profits and ways to control music that they long ago lost almost all control over. You have to wonder if, looking back now, they aren’t thinking of all their recent efforts as merely shutting the barn door after all the animals already escaped. And the change in tune has been brisk… Now, just two weeks into ‘09, Apple has announced one of the broadest and most accessible withdrawals of DRM and price restructuring of MP3s in years. The four major labels have helped produce this movement, and it shows the increasing power of the consumers in the music marketplace. Once tied to hard copy formats like CDs with an average price table, consumers this year found diverse and creative ways to obtain their music, forcing the hand of the labels to recognize that DRM is not what the people want. How this lack of DRM will effect iPod sales or iTunes downloads remains to be seen. The launch of the App Store on iTunes also took music mobile with an incredible number of music related apps (and a few apps that are just plain incredible) designed for the iPhone.

The idea of Take Away shows and having artists perform live in unconventional venues took off. Nine Inch Nails picked up on Radiohead’s experiment with a free download format of an album, but they’ve taken it a step further now by offering over 400 GB of HD video footage from their concert tours up on torrent streams for fans to remix and create DVDs. This fan interaction has become tantamount to bands in the last year with MySpace including music, and a large number of acts going from conventional websites to social networking platforms.

And while these social networking sites and the bands that use them were beginning to become increasingly entwined, musicians were getting in the mix as well, literally. Late in 2008, MixMatchMusic officially opened its doors to musicians from all over the world to create, upload, collaborate and work with stems to broaden the ways people approach making music. With the DemoGod award at Demo ‘08, a write-up in the San Francisco Chronicle and the ever-popular RemixSarahPalin.com, this vision of worldwide musical collaboration and the power of mixing and matching steps closer to being a full-fledged reality. (MixMatchMusic)

So what’s next? With the DRM barriers falling, the new foundations of band and fan interaction being laid and Web 2.0 casting a wider net over the ‘net, music in 2009 could be anyone’s game. Personally, I’m just waiting for The Detox… And now a moment for the outstanding musicians we lost this year, Bo Diddley and LeRoi Moore, among others.