all the world's a stage...

futurejournalismproject:

Bjork’s upcoming Biophilia is being touted as an “album app” that will contain periodically released, dedicated apps for each song. 

In an interview with Evolver.fm, apps creator Scott Snibbe explains that the forward thinking innovation is actually a throwback to the days of vinyl. 

[I]n some reviews of [the first two tracks released in] Biophilia, people said, “Wow, I haven’t had this experience in 20 years. Before CDs came out, I’d buy an album and hold the 12-inch cover in my hand, sitting cross-legged on the floor while I listened to the music, read the liner notes, and looked at the pictures.” People used to have this very tactile, multimedia experience when they bought an album.

But with the digitization of music, we’ve lost that special moment. You can think of the app as, finally, that chance to unwrap the box and have a personal, intimate experience again with music. It might be the case that people spend a lot of time with the app when it first comes out [as they did with album covers] and then perhaps they’ll move on to purely enjoying the music after that. But we’ll really have to wait and see.

Publishers take note: replace music and vinyl with news and print, and the music industry Bjork might be teaching us something.

Image: art from the “Virus” song app.

Innovation is not dead. Hurrah!

(via fastcompany)