Music industry discovers marketing power of iPhone apps

The early White Stripes releases were on a label called Sympathy for the Record Industry. The name was a canny little dig at major label practices. But in truth sympathy for record companies has been in short supply of late. Not least because their failure to foresee the growth of MP3s over physical formats left them with an outmoded business model and at the mercy of pirates until Spotify offered some form of salvation.

But not all companies are quite so techno-phobic. This week XL, home of the Prodigy the Stripes and Lemon Jelly, came up with a fantastic marketing wheeze that harnesses the exponential growth of iPhone applications.

Visitors to the iTunes store can currently download a free Tetris-style game with the twist being that players are loading a tour van with musical instruments. The app is even equipped with an online high score table.

It’s all in aid of promoting newish signings and disciples of the shoegaze movement Titus Andronicus. Two tracks from their Airing of Grievances album play throughout the game, one of which called My Time Outside The Womb is set to be their next single.

You can only applaud this kind of marketing verve, which if it doesn’t give them a hit will raise their profile far more effectively than any number of gigs on the toilet circuit or wearisome interviews with T4 types.

If you’ve any doubt about this, cast your mind back to the dark days of the original Gameboy, which used Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy as its backing music. A cash-in single which remixed the ancient classical piece was a top ten hit, purely off the back of kids recognising it as the Tetris theme.

With any luck, as companies wake up to the marketing possibilities that the iPhone app store offers we’ll get a deluge of free diversionary software in months to come. One thing is for certain, though, is that XL’s rivals will be checking the apps download numbers very closely in months to come.

Drug-dealing game on the iPhone...Just Say No

This week the red-tops have rounded on Underworld – an iPhone game that simulates the drug dealing experience. The application, which was due for an imminent release, allows players to experience the greasy netherworld of life as a small-time pusher trading cannabis and ecstasy to impressionable young teens.

Quoted in pretty much all the reports is a mother whose daughter tragically died from a heroin overdose. Not unreasonably, she’s condemned the game and is affronted by it. Also fighting her corner is the drug treatment charity Addaction. A statement from the charity opined that the although the game “may be intended to be light-hearted, it only serves to trivialise a very important issue.”

Naturally we’ve been here before. GTA, for instance, wasn’t shy of controversy and nor was Rockstar games’ follow-up Bully. But at least those titles had some elements that meant you could defend them and argue that they weren’t without some merit or some sort of moral standpoint. Bully, for instance, actually set you against playground menaces. Meanwhile, for all its faults, GTA was a fantastically realised virtual world and crucially came with an 18 certificate to keep it out of the sticky fingers of minors.

However, in the case of Underworld, what is there to stand up for? Certainly not the gameplay. It’s just a tarted-up trading sim that is unspeakably moribund and tedious. So, in a desperate attempt to garner sales, developers A-Steroids have tacked on a paper-thin drug theme. Depressingly it will probably work. But the really saddening thing is that it’ll be the games industry and gamers that get demonised as a result.

Make no mistake, the likes of Underworld will give games enthusiasts and the industry as a whole a bad name. By cynically targeting adolescents with an immature worldview, A-Steroids is dragging gaming back to the dim and distant time when arcades were seen as akin to the Cantina bar from Star Wars. A place lest we forget that Obi Wan Kenobi described as “a hive of scum and villainy”.

What’s especially disappointing is that mobile phone gaming is in many respects a bold new frontier. Especially in the case of the iPhone and LG handsets, whose accelerometers could usher in Wii-style motion sensitive games and bring games on mobiles to a new mainsteam audience. Underworld on the other hand seems to want to take us back into the bad old days.