New iPhone Remix App Lets You Ruin Your Favorite Song

This morning Apple launched a new app from Romplr and Moderati that allows users to create their own remixes of songs on their iPhones, which is either totally brilliant or the end of music forever.

The app, which for the moment is only being used with a few unlistenable Soulja Boy tunes, allows users to remix songs by inserting or removing various song elements, applying sound effects, and dropping in assorted samples provided by the developers (users cannot, at this time, upload their own sound samples into the program.) There are also random tracks that you can put together with Romplr Dance, and the app allows you to send your masterpiece to your friends via e-mail or Facebook or what have you.

In a way it’s a pretty cool idea, in that greater interaction between the user and the artist could foster a deeper appreciation of the task the musician and their producer embark on when they put together a song. Plus, this kind of interactivity is nothing new and almost always positive (as when Jay-Z’s release of an a capella version of The Black Album brought about dozens of great remixes like The Grey Album, all of which just highlighted how great The Black Album was in the first place.)

But there’s something weird, culturally, about this.  This quote pretty much says it all:

“If you’re looking at our target demo, our consumer for music, I think kids are going to be more and more interested in doing something interactive,” said Christian Jorg, Head of Digital at Island Def Jam Music Group, a division of Universal. “Obviously, they love games, and they love to interact with music. Now you’ve got an opportunity there with an iPhone app where you can actually do that.”

That’s the heart of it: at what point can we differentiate between artists playfully interacting with their fans and kids just dickering around with another stupid game to pass the time? And what about the weird expectancy and entitlement that inevitably goes along with that? (”The new Kanye is weak. It didn’t even come with an iPhone remix.”)

Not to fogey out here, but do games like Guitar Hero and easy-out-of-the-box mixers like Garage Band actually lead to a better appreciation of music and the artists involved, or do we just get a generation of water heads dragging their laptops on stage with them because they can’t be bothered to make friends with a drummer?  And who wants a shittily remixed version of a Soulja Boy song e-mailed to them anyway?

Remixable Albums Offer Hope for Music Industry [Wired - Epicenter]
Crank That Soulja Boy Remix On The iPhone [TechCrunch]