web apps

Apps are not the answer.

With all the choices you can make for engaging people through their mobile phones, apps should be considered a last resort. Why?

Asking people to install an app means friction.

They want to do something;
They see the download app page;
Tap and go to the App Store page;
Wait for the app to install;
Have to login again.

At every step along the way you can lose people. Scratch that. At every step along the way you will lose people. Why?

The reason I hear most often is: so that you have your app on their phone and people can return easily. But do they?

Most people are not like you. Many of the people who read this will be tech early adopters, so it’s likely you use many apps and install them easily. But the typical US smartphone owner downloads ZERO apps per month (other estimates put it at 1.5 per month).

us-smartphone-users-number-of-app-downloads-per-month-of-smartphone-users-new_chartbuilder

Most app use is concentrated on 5 apps. Can you be one of those apps and compete with the likes of Google and Facebook, who together controlled the 10 most popular apps in 2016?

Apps are expensive to develop and maintain, difficult to make quick adjustments due to submission review processes, and not as engaging as other options.

So what other options do you have?

If you think you can get people to install your app, it means you believe you already have their attention. Great.

So you have two things to worry about:

Can the core functionality be achieved through mobile web?
If yes, then the next question is: how do I keep people coming back?

And if your core functionality is “I want to be able to send push notifications” then there may still be better ways. In music, examples of core functionality that may be hard to work around are:

Music listening in background, eg. when the phone is in the pocket and you’re doing other stuff.
Functionality that’s available when the user is offline.

But I digress, because often those functions may be ‘nice to haves’ and may not be essential. Imagine if a venue has a site where you can check upcoming gigs and also listen to some music… Now a marketing manager there may say: “we absolutely need people to be able to listen to music in the background.” But you can achieve this more easily by offering a Spotify playlist.

Back to push notifications. Keep your eye on messaging apps, because they’re steadily becoming the new social networks and they’re notification-based.

In order to hold onto people’s attention, you may not need push notifications. You need habit. This requires consistency from your side and design thinking on how to construct a habit forming product that people don’t forget about.

You may also use reminders. You could collect email addresses or even phone numbers.

Artists’ newsletters have a 20–25% open rate. 90% of SMS messages are read within the first 3 minutes of receiving. Since starting MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE, I’ve had a handful of unsubscriptions, but that’s nothing compared to the number of uninstalls I would have had.

Still think building an app is a good idea?

Write down who your audience is. How do they use the web. Be realistic and don’t project your own tendencies. Call a bunch of your users if you have to.
Write down exactly what you want people to be able to do. Frame it as a user story: “I can find information about my favourite band’s upcoming gigs in my town”.
Rank your user stories. Then mark the ones that are essential.
Small secret: the ones that you didn’t mark as essential, you’ll probably never build.
Think of ways in which you can achieve the same end results, without building an app that users need to install. (I can help you with that)
Now look at whether introducing the friction of an app is actually the best way to do it. Carefully count the number of steps required for the user to complete their user story.

Choose whatever has the least friction and still accomplishes your goal.

When the urge to get creative strikes, here’s how you can drop a beat fast.

It’s not only the internet’s websites and platforms that change. Under the hood, our browsers are getting more powerful, allowing for rich experiences without having to manually download apps.

Here are ten fun tools to drop beats right from your desktop browser.

Splice Beat Maker

https://splice.com/sounds/beatmaker

Splice Beat Maker

How it describes itself: Make and share beats in your browser.

How it works: Splice Sounds is a subscription service with a million loops, samples and presets for producers. Beat Maker allows people to dig into Splice’s library for free. You can check out beats created by established producers, remix those beats, or just start from scratch and program something yourself.

First impression: You can easily spend hours on this. What I find most remarkable about it is that this is a perfect example of marketing done right.

108

http://martinwecke.de/108/

108

How it describes itself: A minimal beat machine in the browser.

How it works: You see a dot moving around a circle and you can populate the circle with drum samples by using your keyboard. Each time the dot hits the sample, it plays it. It runs at 108 beats per minute, hence the name.

First impression: Easy if you want to mess around quickly put some drum pattern together. Unfortunately everything gets placed in a grid: this makes it hard to create something terrible, but also hard to play with timings and get really creative.

Blokdust

https://blokdust.com/

How it describes itself: BlokDust is a free to use web-based music, sound and instrument creation app.

How it works: The web app gives you a tool box to generate tones, feed them to effects, link them to interactive components like your computer’s keyboard or even a MIDI controller, and has different tools that lets you power up the events. Because of the latter, you can create self-playing devices that generate soundscapes (click here for an example that lets you interact through the bottom row of your keyboard).

First impression: Very cool, very powerful. Not only do they provide an extensive set of guides and tutorials, but the project is also open source and the developers invite people to learn from, fork, or contribute to the code.

Sample Stitch

http://samplestitch.com/

Sample Stitch

How it describes itself: Try re-constructing the samples of popular producers’ beats.

How it works: It takes the original samples used by 3 popular hiphop tracks and lets you recompose the beat using your keyboard.

First impression: Fun to play around with and try to build something cool. It’s good to read the stories at the bottom of the page, too. It gives a perspective about the amount of work hiphop producers put into digging for samples, picking the right ones and constructing beats out of them. One downside: at the moment of writing the share-function is busted.

Incredibox

http://www.incredibox.com/

Incredibox v4

How it describes itself: Incredibox is a musical app in which you can quickly and easily create a mix by running a band of beatboxers.

How it works: You start with one guy. When you give him an accessory like a hat or sunglasses, he’ll start beatboxing or singing. As soon as you dress someone up, another guy appears until finally the box is filled with 6 beatboxers working on your song.

First impression: This one’s truly for everyone. It’s so easy that it’s impossible to make anything that doesn’t sound good. There are 4 editions, I suggest you start with the newest ones. Each edition has special unlockable moments that you have to find by combining the right elements… so it’s a game, too!

Voice Spinner

https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Voice-Spinner

Voice Spinner

How it describes itself: Spin the spinner like a record player — slow, fast, forward, backward — to hear how it affects the sound.

How it works: Click the record icon in the middle. Say something, sing something, rhyme something. Then use the slider below to play it back in various ways.

First impression: Cute little tool to play around with. Especially fun to then play some music from another player and try to layer your vocal on top of it. Highlighting this, because it’s part of the Google Chrome Music Lab which has a dozen other music making tools for in your browser.

YUME

http://unseen-music.com/yume/

YUME

How it describes itself: YUME is an interactive musical exploration created to promote the new album from ambient artist Helios. Manipulate sound and explore a dream-like world.

How it works: You‘ll see a screen with diamond-shaped objects, or perhaps kites, that you can drag to manipulate the sound. As you play around with them, you can explore other areas in the audiovisual world, which will have other configurations.

First impression: The initial screen is a little bit confusing, but that ends up really encouraging exploration, which is the right way to bring people into these types of experiences.

Sampulator

http://sampulator.com/

Sampulator

How it describes itself: Music production made easy. Create beats in your browser.

How it works: Your entire keyboard gets turned into a sampling machine. It allows you to program drums, including some great 808 sounds, keys, vocal samples, and more. If you’re good, you can make fantastic beats like this.

First impression: This is right up my alley, because I love 808 driven beats and it has some samples common in the juke and jersey club genres that I often listen to. I like that you can play stuff live and then drag them around in the grid, in case your timing was off.

wavepot

http://wavepot.com/

wavepot

How it describes itself: The digital audio workstation of the web.

How it works: A better description would be: live programming music. If you’re a decent programmer, you can make some cool things with this. If you’re not, then just load up one of the examples and start editing numbers and variables and see what happens.

First impression: Reminds me of ‘algoraves’ where people live program music in front of audiences. I wasn’t able to get the sounds out of it that I wanted to, but the interface (or lack thereof, I guess) makes up for it.

Orbit Sampler

http://www.dreampipe.io/orbit/

Orbit Sampler

How it describes itself: Another browser-based music production app by DreamPipe.

How it works: Despite the lackluster description, it’s one of the more interesting tools. It lets you arrange your samples in circular sequences, which is sometimes argued to be a more intuitive way to visualize rhythms than the typical bar line.

First impression: Save it for the weekend or a late evening. It’s very powerful, but a bit hard to do something quick, because of the level of detail it offers. You can spend hours and hours on this.

Having fun? Drop some of your most creative work in the responses to this piece. No time to play and want to listen to music made by others? Click here for some great tools to discover something new.