More Cowbell: Brainstorming an NPR Music iPhone App

Have you seen the new iPhone application "More Cowbell?" Simply download the free app to add glorious clanking cowbell sounds to any song playing on your iPhone. Simple, clean, and oh-so entertaining.

My cowbell affections aside, the creativity and usefulness of iPhone music applications is astonishing. The Pandora application, for example, offers instant music exploration and purchasing with just a few taps on your screen.

NPR Music offers an abundance of content to encourage music discovery--exclusive live concerts, intimate studio sessions and interviews with artists and popular programs such as All Songs Considered and Song of the Day. Working within the rights and permissions that artists and labels have generously allowed us to feature their music, we are planning to create iPhone applications that not only highlight our content, but also help users wade through the material to discover music that matters to them. It is also our goal to create something that capitalizes on the unique features of the iPhone.

Is it a program that reminds you to tune in to our live concerts as the artist takes the stage? Or a recommendation system to guide you through our thousands of artist pages? Do you want the Song of the Day delivered automatically, or the ability to find local public radio music programming wherever you are?

One of our resident music experts, All Songs Considered producer Robin Hilton, posted his Top
5 iPhone Music Applications on the All Songs Considered Blog. See if you agree with him and tell us how an NPR Music iPhone app could be added to the list.

-Amy Schriefer, NPR Music

Tags: More Cowbell | NPR Music | apps | iPhone | mobile

1:29 PM ET | 07-24-2008 | permalink

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Life After the Mobile Web: Will Media Ever be the Same?

Mobile applications like Twitter have certainly changed social media, but is wireless mobility also changing traditional media? In our efforts to create a new way to engage NPR listeners, the team who created the NPR Mobile Web site may have stumbled upon an emerging trend in America's ever changing appetite for information. Then again, the many ways that our mobile audience acts differently from our online and radio audiences may just highlight some of the limitations of mobile technology.

Like Twitter, which is both a social network and a mobile application, NPR mobile combines two ideas from our collective fantasies into something new. In our case, we combined the idea of the mobile Web with the Dick Tracy watch. If you point your Web-enabled mobile device to http://m.npr.org, you'll see what's going on in the world right now and, just like Dick Tracy, you'll hear what's happening. You'll have this experience even if you're using a device that doesn't support streaming audio; when you click the "call" links next to any of the headlines, your mobile phone will dial up a recording of the story over your regular voice network. NPR was one of the first media company to recognize that, in the words of Bryan Moffett (one of the brains behind NPR Mobile), "voice is the killer app" of mobile.

Continue reading "Life After the Mobile Web: Will Media Ever be the Same?" »

Tags: Blackberry | NPR Mobile | Twitter | applications | attention span | audio | iPhone | mobile | radio | smartphone | snackable | streaming | trends

2:50 PM ET | 07-14-2008 | permalink

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