First the Presidents of the United States of America, and now Nine Inch Nails. The music industry is slowly but surely moving to the handset to capture audiences via Apple’s App Store.
We already know that rock god Trent Reznor, lead singer of band Nine Inch Nails (NIN), is possibly the coolest guy on the cutting edge of technology, especially when it comes to bypassing the rip-off elements of the music industry and delivering ‘freemium’ music straight to fans.
Reznor has spoken in the past about the state of the music industry; how music has been reduced to files on computers and how there is an entire generation of music fans that does not see anything wrong with pirating.
The NIN’s frontman has a solution of sorts: musicians and the industry need to fully embrace new technology and use it to offer fans the best experience possible.
This is the next step for Reznor and NIN: a free iPhone application that will be arriving in the iTunes App Store within the next few days.
As reported on Wired.com, this new app will be a free resource for all things NIN-related, from music to video to message boards.
On opening the app, you will see an iPhone-friendly version of the main NIN homepage that will let you know you’re logged in. Below this, the photo blog and latest news is displayed, and users can navigate to different areas of the site using the bottom row of icons for ‘home’, ‘media’, ‘nearby’, ‘messages’ and ‘forum’.
The coolest thing about this application is that it is so fan-centric. NIN decided to add a GPS-enabled feature called ‘Nearby’, which lets the user know when fellow fans are somewhere near.
This new iPhone app will add to NIN’s social media-savvy record to date: the official website has integration with Flickr and YouTube, so that tagging relevant video and imagery enables it to be pulled back into the official NIN site from your accounts.
By Marie Boran
Pictured: Nine Inch Nail’s upcoming iPhone app
