There’s lots of things happening in the music industry related to apps; last week was the launch of Lady Gaga’s Artpop app, something which as much as I wanted to be excited about, I just couldn’t get behind. It could be because I’m not a massive Gaga fan or because I didn’t really ‘get’ the whole concept of the app but I just didn’t think it was worth a full feature. This week though, music blog Pitchfork released their blog called Pitchfork Weekly; which (if you excuse the pun) is music to my ears.
Pitchfork is one of the biggest music blogs in the world, discussing the hottest new talent to the biggest names in music. The app is updated on a weekly basis, with only the most important songs, videos and articles making it into the update. It’s designed to give the user a similar experience to a weekly magazine, rather than the normal online news service which pushes great deals of information in front of you on a minute by minute basis.
Laid out in a quite interesting way, Pitchfork Weekly displays various sized tiles on the screen a bit like the Windows Phone interface. Images are displayed to illustrate each of the stories, text is overlaid onto these but only when your finger is on the screen which can make it quite hard to see what all of the stories are about, but does make it look really smart from a design point of view. Tap the Pitchfork logo in the top left hand corner and you can narrow down the categories of what is displayed on the screen
At the bottom of the app there is a media player to listen to the weekly Pitchfork podcast. This plays continually while you’re browsing through the stories in the app, providing the user with quite a captivating experience.
Overall I really like the whole concept of Pitchfork Weekly. A lot of music blogs can be quite hard to follow, putting out digital reams of information on a daily basis because there’s no cost associated with publishing it. The Pitchfork app takes all of this and picks out the best news stories from the past week giving it that feeling of a printed magazine, which i’m sure many people are starting to miss a bit.
Pitchfork Weekly is available for free on all iOS devices