Snow Patrol’s iPhone App Prizes Art over Commerce, Utility

• By Eliot Van Buskirk  
• October 29, 2008  |  
• 7:22 am  |  
• Categories: Music and Cellphones

We’ve been playing around with another artitst’s promotional iPhone app, having been somewhat impressed by Pink’s initial foray into the iPhone App Store. This new one from the band Snow Patrol, whose developers were apparently in something of an arms race with Pink to release the first artist-themed app, is more artistically ambitious than Pink’s straightforward collection of images and song previews.

The free Snow Patrol Interactive Booklet app (iTunes link) includes a "3D origami star field" that fans can travel through by using a finger-spreading zoom motion on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Clicking on any of the highlit stars brings it to the fore, at which point more finger spreading opens up the origami star to reveal handwritten lyrics to 12 songs, three videos that depict the making of the album and links to the SnowPatrol.com and the band’s presences on iTunes, Facebook, Last.fm, MySpace, Bebo and YouTube. Screenshots of each screen are available below.

This sounds better in theory than it worked in practice.

The app seemed to run slowly on a first-generation iPhone and atfirst, I was confused about whichstars open up and which ones didn’t. As it turns out, you canselect any star that appears a little brighter than the others and then you need to keep zooming to open it. I also realized thatyou need to zoom in while viewing the origami star field in order to travel through it and findall of the material.

This navigation scheme is vague, probably intentionally, because it creates a sort of game out of finding the content. Granted, I figured it out in about five minutes. But who has that kind of time these days?

If you’re afan of the band, it could be amusing to work your way through all ofthese steps to find lyrics or a video, and artist’s iPhone apps will almost certainly evolve far beyond  Pink’s relatively bare-bones approach. But it’s hard notto be a little annoyed when you have to jump through hoops to find the goodies.

There’s also no way to preview and purchase Snow Patrol’s any ofmusic from within the app — instead, you need to link out to those various websites using one of those hard-to-find stars. Given its arty nature, it’s understandable Snow Patrol’sdevelopers may have wanted to leave commerce out of it. But perhapsjust a dash of that Pink-style practicality would have served them well (what about an info page containing the listen and purchase links, so that at least that’s easy to find?).

The opening screen is nicely designed but inscrutable:

I clicked on the one of the brighter origami stars to select it:

Here, the star is half unfolded. You need to keep zooming to unfold it all the way:

This one happened to contain lyrics to "Take Back The City":

Another star contained a video interview of the band talking about recording the album:

Another star contains links to Snow Patrol on various audio and video sites — the only way to hear or purchase the band’s songs through the app:

iPhone — and eventually Google Android — apps are likely to be a hotarea for artists and labels. In other iPhone app news, American Idoltalent show winner David Cook released his new single as a $2 iPhoneapp (iTunes link) that works as a lighter, much like the Zippo app we profiled last week. Each time you spark the virtual lighter, his song plays on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Source