I Built a Music App in Minutes and So Can You

By Eliot Van Buskirk, Evolver.fm

Do you make music? Is it any good? No matter — you, too, can build your own music app in just a few minutes to unleash on an unsuspecting populace.

Conduit Mobile, the app-building company behind the Waka Flocka Flame app and other major-label apps, just made it possible for any musician to create their own music app in minutes using a simple wizard, and it does everything that Conduit’s major-label apps do.

The kicker: You can pay (almost) whatever you want for this, thanks to a pricing-optional Radiohead-style publicity stunt announced Thursday, starting at $1/month in return for unlimited installs.

To find out how Conduit’s artist app builder really worked, I dug up some old MP3s from my solo project, Planet Vegas, and built my own music app this morning.

It only took a few minutes to build the HTML5 version, which is fairly rudimentary in my case, but you can make them more elaborate if you want (see modules to the right). You can try it here.

Want to build a music app even if you don’t know the first thing about coding? Simply select modules from this list and you’re halfway there.

Building my own artist app really couldn’t have been much easier than it was with Conduit. You can include a number of elements: social network feeds, RSS feed, music (of course), tour dates, photos, videos, contact information, reviews, web links, a map and even a link that lets fans call you on the phone, if you dare.

Pick a style, upload a background image and select a color palette. Then it’s time to name your app and fill out a description, and boom, you’re done.

If you have recorded some music and you want your own app, it’s hard to see how this service wouldn’t be worth at least $1 per month. However, we do offer some caveats for those considering it.

First, Conduit doesn’t host any of your band’s large media files for this low price; instead, it relies on your use of outside services to handle most of the stuff in the module. You’ll need to upload your music to SoundCloud, Beatport, your RSS feed or any other location on the internet, and your videos to YouTube, Vimeo, RSS or another internet location. That’s to be expected, considering the cost of hosting large media files for streaming to an unlimited number of users.

Also, your $1 per month or more payment to Conduit only covers the creation of an HTML5 web app, which users can bookmark on their phones and use as they would any other app, replete with an icon on the home screen (if they’re clever enough to figure out how to do that). If you want to turn your creation into an official iOS, Android or Windows Phone app, you’ll need a developer’s account with Apple ($99), Google ($25) or Microsoft ($99) respectively.

Finally, and this is really a nitpick, the app defaults to your Twitter feed upon launch; it would be nice to have the ability to build a fancy splash screen, instead of presenting your fans with a bunch of random news updates right off the bat. But did we mention this only costs a minimum of $1 per month?