Interactive albums coming to iTunes

Coming soon to iPhone and iPod Touch: albums as applications.

(Credit: Apple)

There's been a lot of speculation lately about whether iTunes is a boon or burden to album sales.

Kid Rock has sold more than 1.7 million copies of his latest album, Rock and Roll Jesus, with no iTunes presence at all. And last week, Warner Bros. pulled Estelle's new album from iTunes in the U.S. in hopes of spurring physical sales. (The plan appears to have failed miserably.)

Apple is striking back before this scattered practice turns into a trend. According to Music Week, the company is working with alternative rock band Snow Patrol on an interactive iPhone/iPod Touch application for its next album that will include more album art, videos, and--most important--lyrics, which are still way too hard to find online. (The exceptions are those pop-up-infested and largely inaccurate lyrics sites that show up in Google search.)

I hope this becomes standard practice for new releases--one of the greatest losses in the move from LP to CD to digital files was the gradual elimination of lyric sheets.

[jmranger]

The exception to the exceptions is lyricwiki.org. In particular, look at their plugins page. This allows to download lyrics in, say, iTunes, with a single click. This is the best possible situations until online music store add native lyric support.
The other option is to stick with CDs, which is my current choice.

[catch23]

The Globe Sessions by Sheryl Crow had such an app included with it ( I'm sure Apple will get praise for 'innovating' (I mean copying) like it was 1998 again)

Additional album art, lyrics synced with the music (kind of karaoke style), info about the everyone related to the album. Pretty cool stuff. I always wondered why more albums didn't offer this type of thing.

[bobmarleypeople]

What's even more stupid is that most albums in iTunes come with a PDF of the album booklet anyways. If they offered VIDEOS of behind the scenes or allow people to get the music videos for free when they buy the album or something (like you get special edition albums with a DVD as well as the CD), THEN it'll become interesting. For the moment, MOVE ALONG PEOPLE NOTHING TO SEE HERE.....

[ngarg007]

i agree, online albums should include an interative booklet with special band pics and lyrics etc (the full package) as you would see with a typical cd.