This is insane: the album is dead, long live the app. Who exactly wants to interface with their music collection via app? The app browsing/selection process is easily the clunkiest, most frustrating element of the iPhone/iTouch/iTunes interface, and I’d be surprised to see a majority of people interacting with their music selection via sandboxed apps as opposed to the traditional mp3 player interface.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website.

The headline zooming around the blogs right now is correct on one thing: the album is dying*. But the statement should be more along these lines: the album is dead, long live the playlist. Or long live Random Shuffle. Or iTunes Genius. Trying to create a new product that locks users into one app, particularly given the iPhone’s unscalable app interface and Apple’s insistence on not allowing third-party apps to run in the background, is just another in a long line of failed attempts by the music industry to create a new bundled product that only a handful of obsessives would want.

* And yes, I realize that such a statement sounds contradictory coming a few days after I announced that I’m working on a new album, and to that I say: the album isn’t quite dead yet. The writing’s on the wall, but as long as there are olds who still have some emotional connection to the concept of the album, there will remain a continually shrinking market for it. In addition, the infrastructure just isn’t there to sell and promote single songs or short EP’s for an independent, unsigned artist–to get your music on iTunes, Amazon mp3, CDBaby, etc, it still has to be delivered in album form. This will no doubt change in the next few years, as the emotional attachment to the album continues to fade (I can’t remember the last time I had the desire to listen to a full album, and I’m 33, not 19,), but it’s certainly not going to change in six months or a year.