A decade ago, there was a concerted push for acts to create their own apps with platforms like Mobile Roadie springing up to allow them to do exactly that. There were some successes – Taylor Swift’s cash-generating app on Mobile Roadie and Björk’s dedicated app for her Biophilia album being the two most obvious – but the bulk of them, if even downloaded in the first place, were soon glumly deleted or heartlessly jettisoned to the furthest recesses of smartphone screens.
So it is with some dry-mouthed concern that we greet the news that rapper Pusha T has co-founded a new app. It’s called Heir and is, in the claggy vernacular of the app world, looking to “gamify” A&R around new hip-hop tracks.
“But how?” you might justifiably ask. “Through emojis,” we will reply, the tang of disbelief still detectable in our voices. So what you do is you hear some songs and you vote with emojis. If they are hot, you wheel out the flame emoji. If they are not hot, it’s time to exhume the skull and crossbones emoji. So what makes this any different from a WhatsApp group you reluctantly remain part of simply out of politeness? Well, there are promises of “real rewards” for the top acts and the top voters within the app. Feel free to deploy the praise hands emoji now.
The app even has its own digital currency – what it calls “Crowns” – that can be earned and then spent on rewards by the acts and the users. They can also be cashed out for real money. In terms of the rewards, fans can use them to get “early or exclusive access to an artist’s next tour stop or track release”. For artists, they can be used “to buy the attention of a tastemaker or another artist, get their feedback on a track — and kick off a dialogue if they like it”.
It is playing the long game by not even being available yet. Fans and artists have to sign up for early access, the idea presumably being that word of mouth will give it momentum when it is finally available. It is an interesting strategy and it has admirable aims in an age of discovery algorithms – namely to “show the machines how it’s really done” – but at this stage in the world of apps, trying to persuade users to install yet another one on their phone is like a hand emoji pushing on a closed door emoji.
