I’m delighted to announce the release of SXSW Artists, your guide to the 2000+ artists performing at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas.
Powered by the engine behind My Artists, SXSW Artists integrates with your music library and a wealth of online resources to help you discover the music you should not miss at the festival.
Download SXSW Artists for free from the App Store.
I’d noticed a sharp rise in U.S. sales and App Store ranking for My Artists since yesterday but couldn’t explain it until Daniel Ooi pointed out that the app is featured in Apple’s Music Discovery list.
It’s a fairly low key feature but it’s the first time the app has appeared on a curated list in the App Store, which (a) makes me feel good and (b) has taken the app from relative obscurity in the U.S. to hovering between #50 and #60 in the Top Paid Music Apps chart.
I’ve decided to drop the price of the app to $0.99 for the duration of the promotion.
Dropping the price to 99c has had little to no effect on revenue in the past: generally downloads double but I earn half the commission on each sale. However, in this case I’m hoping the increased sales, bolstered by Apple’s promotion, will push the app comfortably into the top 50 music apps and increase exposure there. It’s hardly an exact science this but it is kind of fun.
My Artists’ position in Top Paid Music Apps in Canada since the last time it was actually purchased
So it’s no secret that the App Store is about to reach ten billion downloads.
But when?
Pádraig got in touch with me on Friday evening to let me know he’d found a way to process the data behind Apple’s app counter to determine when we might reasonably expect the milestone to be reached and see if I was interested in helping him put together a mini-site to publish the countdown.
On Sunday I had some time to play around with a simple design and on Monday TenBillionApps.com went live.
According to the latest calculations the ten billionth app will be downloaded on Saturday 22 January just after 1pm PST.
We’ve also used the mini-site as an opportunity to push apps by some independent developers. My own app, My Artists, is there but I’ve written enough about that before. Movie Challenge by Redwind Software is the ultimate movie trivia game and Redwind have just put it on sale for $0.99 until this countdown hits zero. Slideshow Builder by BitWink uses face detection to ensure that faces in your photos stay on screen during slideshow animations and has a handy Jump Face Animation mode to ensure everyone gets their moment in the limelight.
One of the most requested features since My Artists launched in August has been a track scrubber.
My Artists 1.1.3 replaces the slider previously used to change volume with a control to monitor and adjust the current playback position.
OBSlider
I started with a standard UISlider with custom graphics. I quickly realised that, like in the iPod app, when trying to seek to a particular second within a track we need to have finer control over the position of the slider-thumb than a standard UISlider offers.
Luckily, Ole Begemann has just produced OBSlider (blog post | source on github), “a drop-in replacement for UISlider with the addition of variable scrubbing speeds.” By simply dropping in Ole’s class and adjusting a few variables to optimise scrubbing speed I had a slider that offered the fine control I needed. While dragging the slider-thumb into position the user can adjust scrubbing speed, just like in the iPod app, by sliding their finger vertically away from the control. Sliding back towards the control adjust scrubbing speed back to normal and brings the slider-thumb back into line with your finger.
MPVolumeView with AirPlay
The volume control, which now also supports AirPlay source selection, is now revealed along with the artist biography by tapping on the artist photo. This is opposite to where the iPod app positions the controls but makes more sense to me since most iOS devices now have physical volume control buttons, thus making the on-screen controls less important.
Developers are somewhat limited in how they can add an AirPlay route selector to their apps. At the moment the only supported way is to add an MPVolumeView, which contains a system volume slider and, if available, an AirPlay route selector button.
The volume slider can be disabled by setting the showsVolumeSlider property to NO and then you would have a control that just shows an Airplay button when multiple routes are available but there is no way, yet, to programatically tell whether multiple routes have been detected or not and dynamically update the interface yourself to accommodate the additional button, as the iPod app does. There is also no way to customise the appearance or size of the button which is a pity because the 18 point high tappable area is frustratingly easy to miss with your finger.
Appirater
Not a feature per se but another addition to My Artists with 1.1.3 will be presenting itself to regular users of the app in a few days time.
To encourage positive app store reviews and ratings I wanted to add a timely alert to My Artists 1.1.3 that would politely ask users of the app to rate the latest version.
A quick search uncovered Appirator (blog post | source on github) by Arash Payan, a very useful class that takes care of tracking how long a user has had the latest version of your app installed, how many times they’ve used it, and how many times they’ve performed any particular “significant event”. Once your desired conditions have been met the user will be presented with an alert view asking if they would consider rating your app.
Once the Appirator class has been added to your project you set certain constants like your App ID and the conditions that should be met before the user is asked to rate the app. In My Artists’ case, users of a particular version must have it installed for 3 days, have used the app at least 10 times, and have loaded the Now Playing screen at least 10 times.
You then make calls to the following class methods from the relevant places within your code:
+ (void)appLaunched:(BOOL)canPromptForRating;+ (void)appEnteredForeground:(BOOL)canPromptForRating;+ (void)userDidSignificantEvent:(BOOL)canPromptForRating;This made it exceptionally easy to set up My Artists so that only those who regularly use the app (hopefully, by extension, those who like it the most) are prompted to rate it in the App Store and ensure that they are prompted at a fairly opportune moment (the Now Playing screen most often loads when the user has made a music choice and the music has just begun playing).
Donal Prendiville, my Grandad, was a great man who told terrible jokes. After telling a particularly cheesy joke he would laugh heartily and declare it to be one out of the top drawer.
Grandad lived and worked as a veterinary surgeon in Killorglin, Co. Kerry. He was a big athletic man with broad shoulders and a warm smile.
He died 10 years ago today on 20 December 2000 in Cork University Hospital.
I will always remember taking drives in his van, guarding my ice-cream when he would try trick me to “steal” some, our innocent amazement at how he could eat a whole potato in one bite, his afternoon naps in the living room, his astonishing work ethic, the pound coins he would slip into our hands when we visited, and the Top Drawer he left to fill.
To mark Grandad’s anniversary, I’m giving away 50 free copies of My Artists. First come, first served on the promo codes below. Just click to claim your free copy of the app.
Links generated by PromoLinks by Vinny Coyne
I made My Artists free for a day last week in the hope that the attention it received during that day would help sales once it went back to being a paid app.
This chart shows revenue generated by My Artists in the week leading up to and the week following the promotion:
The app generated $13 of sales on the promotion day itself due to some discrepancies between when iTunes Connect logs a sale and when the App Store updates itself with revised prices.
Over the course of the promotion (1 day plus about 6 hours in certain timezones) My Artists was downloaded over 30,000 times. The following day, on sale at $0.99, the app was purchased by about 1,400 customers and sales have fallen off each day since until yesterday, which marked the first rise in sales. Today I increased the price back to $1.99 and will see what effect this has on revenue going forward.
Downloads of My Artists Lite have been similarly effected:
The promotion earned me a few days of significantly increased revenue and a much broader user-base: six times as many customers downloaded My Artists or My Artists Lite in the past week than in the three months beforehand.
At the moment My Artists only revenue stream is the initial sale of the app but I plan to integrate iTunes affiliate links to purchase music and in-app purchases for certain premium features so this expanded group of users will be helpful when judging the potential of these initiatives.
Two days ago I made My Artists free for a day in the hope that it would help boost sales once the promotion ended. I was unsure whether it would pay off but since sales of the app had dwindled I figured it was worth a shot.
Yesterday I reported how the app performed while free and adjusted the price to $0.99, a drop from its original $2.99 price tag.
This was not the first time I had tried a price drop to $0.99 to test the effect on revenue but it was by far the most successful experiment with pricing to date. The chart below shows royalty receipts since the release of My Artists in August.
I originally proposed that I would steadily move the price from free back to $2.99. However, given the huge impact this promotion has had, I have decided to refrain from changing any more of the variables for the time being and will leave the price at $0.99 until some level of equilibrium is reached.
Now to see how this plays out over the coming days and weeks.
Yesterday I discussed revenue generated from sales of My Artists to date and how I hoped to boost the figures by making the app free for a day.
My Artists was free all day yesterday which had minimal effect on my income since daily revenue had been quite low anyway.
While free however, My Artists was downloaded 27,602 times.
This made the app one of the top 10 free music apps in many markets.
Today, My Artists is available for US$0.99 and yesterday’s promotion is having a strong effect on sales. I won’t have any sales figures yet but app store rankings look promising.
It’s already safe to conclude that the current promotion will be far more successful than the times I previously tried to generate interest by dropping the price directly to $0.99 from $1.99 and $2.99.
Firm numbers coming tomorrow. You can help make them impressive by grabbing My Artists for 99c now.
I decided to throw caution to the wind and make My Artists free for a day. User feedback on the app has been overwhelmingly positive since it launched but sales have not always reflected that.
After a strong start, sales had dwindled to a daily average of 17.2 over the past two months.
Those two peaks represent the times I tried out US$0.99 promotions, the effect of which was minimal on revenue:
With daily revenue so low I figured it was worth a shot putting the app free for one day.
At midnight last night, GMT, I changed the price tier of the app to Free in anticipation for some promotion I was planning for today. Inadvertently this made it free in certain territories for a portion of yesterday.
This graph shows downloads before My Artists had even had a full day of being free.
I’m hoping that once today’s download figures roll in I will see a significantly expanded user-base.
I’m also hoping to use this increased exposure over the coming days to directly sell more apps. Instead of regressing immediately to the current US$2.99 price tag, tomorrow the app will take one step up the ladder to US$0.99, before increasing to US$1.99 and finally slipping back into place at US$2.99.
I’m theorising that this strategy will see me shortly back at the same price point as before, but with many more happy users and increased daily sales.
Please help by downloading My Artists for free and letting as many people know about it as you can.
Tune back in here over the coming days for updates on how this works out.
