Mobile media has sold like hotcakes in recent years, managing to establish itself as a truly hot and almost evergreen commodity in the face of economic slowdowns and shifting market trends. This is largely due to the personalized and changing natures of mobile content, which allows providers to keep throwing out new and varied types of content with the knowledge that different demographics are likely to respond well to it. As such, music labels have found it a great idea to tie up with mobile content providers, offering their immense music libraries as sources for ringtones and full-track downloads that users can enjoy.
Mobile startup Smule has undertaken the preparation of mobile apps that blend musical entertainment with mobile fun. Their Ocarina and I Am T-Pain apps are evidence of this. Ocarina allows the user to “turn” their iPhone into a variety of musical instruments that they can then play, while I Am T-Pain puts the user in the hard-rapping, hard-rocking shoes of recoding artist T-Pain and allows them to sing and have their voice overlaid with the currently popular Auto-Tune voice enhancer. It’s no surprise, then, that Smule would be involved in making popular TV program Glee into a mobile household name as well for their next trick.
Glee is a Fox television series that focuses on the growth and development of the members and moderator of a high school glee club, with rotating focus on each member and moderator Will Schuster. It manages to establish itself as a compelling and engaging show, as its cast gets ample face time thanks to its intertwining and character-driven plots. More interestingly in a meta way, the show is basically a stage for performing a variety of recognizable songs in a choral or solo remake format, making it a musical of sorts and a great way for old and new songs to get a new spin and more exposure. As such, putting the show on your iPhone as a music app makes perfect sense.
The Glee app is said to have been one of the more ambitious applications Smule has worked on, since it’s pretty involved. It expands on what they did with I Am T-Pain, with users singing into their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, and a pitch auto-correction process automatically adjusts their pitch to the song they’re signing to. However, here the app also generates background singers singing in blended harmony, as one would expect of performing a solo backed up by a glee club. For all its technological advancement, the app only costs $2.99 for users to enjoy and sing to.
Reviews on the app suggest that while groundbreaking in its way, it’s not as immediate a hook of I Am, T-Pain. That might be a personal preference matter, however. One more complaint is that it’s very taxing on the iPhone 3G CPU, which might make it a more appealing app for the iPad – although imagining using that much larger model as a large, flat simulated microphone is a feat all its own. Nevertheless, the app is about as much fun as watching the show, and should provide hours of entertainment for users who can belt to the regular lineup or the extra tracks they can pay to download.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
