Metal iPhone app: Suffocation
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Suffocation is the first death metal band with an iPhone app. It’s free from the iPhone App store. I gave it a whirl, and here’s what I found.
The app has five sections: Home, Music, Fan Wall, News, and More. Home is a waste of space. It shows the cover to Suffocation’s new album, Blood Oath, which comes out today on Nuclear Blast. It also shows the latest headline from News and which song you’re streaming from Music. The latter so far contains two songs from Blood Oath, live versions of these songs, and links to buy these tracks.
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Fan Wall is like a MySpace comments section. It’s fun for about 10 seconds. I frankly don’t care to communicate with random Suffocation fans, though it’s cool to see Guy Marchais from the band chime in. (See above screenshot.) The Fan Wall might be more interesting with a band like, say, Nine Inch Nails, whose fans are more numerous and more likely to have iPhones. Comments on Suffocation’s Fan Wall are mostly along the lines of “This app rules!”
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News is a feed from Suffocation’s MySpace blog.
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More has a bunch of sub-sections. Photos offers a good number of high-quality, professional photos of the band. Videos is a feed from Suffocation’s YouTube channel. Discography and Biography are self-explanatory. The former has iTunes links for buying the band’s albums. Shows seems to be localized, as it tells me only about the upcoming show in NYC on 7/19, with a “Buy Tickets” link. Links offers links to Suffocation’s social networking sites: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, etc. (Nuclear Blast’s promotions team is really on the ball.) Feedback and About are self-explanatory.
Summary
Suffocation’s iPhone app isn’t bad. With streaming audio, user comments, news, and pics/videos/etc., it essentially replicates the band’s Myspace, minus the long load times and Flash shenanigans, plus strategically placed “buy” links. It could have done much more. Band apps should offer unique content. It doesn’t have to be valuable or involved. For example, I particularly enjoyed the Photos section. I also dug the exclusive live tracks, even though they had raw, lo-fi sound. Fans obsessive enough to download this app would appreciate such minutiae. Why not offer a live track from each night of the current tour? That would create an incentive to return to the app day after day. Right now, its offerings are finite and static.
A review of this app is really a review of Mobile Roadie, its back end platform. Nuclear Blast didn’t program Suffocation’s iPhone app. They paid several hundred dollars, then added and customized content using Mobile Roadie’s tools (like how people blog with Blogger and WordPress). It’s cool they were first on the extreme metal market with such an app, though I don’t relish the idea of thousands of bands churning out iPhone apps. Perhaps labels are better positioned to consolidate content from various bands into a single app. In any case, apps are what one makes of them. I eagerly await more metal band iPhone apps — especially one from Immortal.
To create a band iPhone app, go to Mobile Roadie and enter “invisorang” in the referrer field.
