The best music apps and musician twitterers

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Text heavies: Lily Allen now has almost 1.5 million followers to ask “Where’s great for lunch in Sao Paulo?”

Technology is racing forward at such a terrifying rate that Facebook is already starting to look like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

However, it is possible to avoid social death, virtual or otherwise, by bandying two words as if you know what they mean: apps and Twitter.

Apps, short for applications, are the bolt-on gizmos favoured by iPhone users but soon to get a grip on other phones such as BlackBerries, too. Apple has shifted more than 1.5 billion of these games and services in the past 12 months and many of the most popular are music-related. Even if you think all iPhone owners should be herded onto a giant smug bus and driven at great speed towards the Grand Canyon, you have to admit they're having more fun on the Tube than the rest of us.

Twittering is similar to texting everyone you know and a selection of celebrities you don't know, all at once, about the tiniest details of your life. Inevitably hundreds of musicians, unobtrusive wallflowers that they are, have taken to the service like journalists to a free bar.

The trouble is too many singers have little of interest to say beyond the release date of their next single, and too often their record company flunkeys do their updates for them. Yet the most enthusiastic — and apparently genuine — users might surprise you (MC Hammer, Chesney Hawkes and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds are all active) and at their best, they reveal far more than traditional means of communicating with their public would allow. They argue, divulge strange passions and expose themselves as bigger consumers of junk food and bad telly, and worse spellers, than us mortals. Courtney Love's Twitter even has an accompanying feed (twitter.com/CLtranslated) which rewrites her tweets in more comprehensible English.

Here are some of the best music apps and musician twitterers around right now. Even if you don't know your app from your elbow, you'd do well to find out what everyone's fussing about.

Apps with attitude
All available to download from the
iTunes store.
Beatmaker (£11.99)
Amazingly versatile music-making software that lets you put a song together from a library of sounds or record your own samples and incorporate them too. Hip hop producer Timbaland is a fan.

Bebot (£1.19)
A synthesiser that makes sounds and animates a dancing cartoon robot as your fingers move across the screen.

Bloom (£2.39)
An ambient music maker developed by Brian Eno. Create your own version of Eno's Music for Airports as you touch the screen to generate tasteful bleeps and blips and pulsating circle patterns.

Last.fm (free)
The music recommendation software works in the same way as it does on your PC, suggesting new music to match your tastes, creating playlists based on a particular artist and suggesting appropriate gigs near you.

Melodica (59p)
Inspired by the Tenori-on, the glowing instrument popularised by Little Boots, this allows you to compose electronic music by building patterns of lights on the screen.

Ocarina (59)
One of the most popular apps to date, this turns your iPhone into a kind of flute, playing tunes as you blow into it and touch holes on the screen to change the notes. See also I Am T-Pain (£1.79) by the same manufacturer, which turns your voice into an Auto-Tuned robot's as you sing into the microphone.

Shazam (free)
The pub quiz must-have. Identify songs you hear just by holding the phone towards the music, and offers a one-touch link to buy them in the iTunes store.

Spotify (£10 per month)
The hugely publicised music streaming service finally arrives on a portable device this month, allowing your phone access to a vast library of songs.

Star6 (£3.99)
Extremely cool-looking remix application that lets you fiddle with its accompanying samples or your own on a colourful, user-friendly interface. Tilting the phone also affects the sounds.

Tap Tap Revenge (£0.59)
Apparently now on 34 per cent of all iPhones, this Guitar Hero-type rhythm game is growing all the time. Coldplay, Lady Gaga and Nine Inch Nails all now have versions with their own songs at £2.99 each.
 
Top twitterers
Lily Allen (twitter.com/lilyroseallen)
Once an outspoken MySpace blogger, Lily has taken to the briefer Twitter format with real enthusiasm and now has almost 1.5 million followers. This week she's been arguing with people about illegal filesharing and asking: “Where's great for lunch in Sao Paulo?”

Diddy (twitter.com/iamdiddy)
The master self-publicist formerly known as Puff Daddy is never off Twitter, either enthusing about his own music with multiple exclamation marks or dispensing self-help words of wisdom such as: “We are here for a short time, the ones who smile the most are the winners, be happy and smile a lot.”

50 Cent (twitter.com/50cent)
The rapping beefcake is hard at work plugging his book The 50th Law, an Art of War-style book of tough guy maxims to live by. Selected quotes on his Twitter feed include: “Reality is my drug. The more I have of it, the more power I get and the higher I feel.”

Calvin Harris (twitter.com/calvinharris)
Frequently funny and frequently angry, the Scottish dance producer reacted noisily on Twitter to indifferent reviews of his latest album. More recently he's been busy telling jokes to fellow pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor. “What do you call a woman who rents a building on a long-term agreement? Lisa.”

John Mayer (twitter.com/johncmayer)
Obsessive Twitter use was reportedly blamed for the Connecticut guitarist's break-up with Jennifer Aniston. He's still on it most days and is a reliably funny read. On his forthcoming album: “Half the songs are out of tune and there is faint yet audible sobbing on some of the tracks.”

Katy Perry (twitter.com/katyperry)
Having already announced in song that she kissed a girl and she liked it, Perry is unsurprisingly revealing about her day-to-day life on Twitter, too, though her finest recent remark was in response to Kanye West upstaging Taylor Swift at the MTV VMA Awards: “IT'S LIKE U STEPPED ON A KITTEN.” 

Pink (twitter.com/pink)
The singer spends a lot of time gushing about the greatness of her husband, motocross racer Carey Hart, and reveals that she has recently bought a skateboard and “separated” her shoulder: “It kinda feels like 50 angry invisible demon fairies are stabbing me.”

Mike Skinner (twitter.com/skinnermike)
He's been using Twitter to test-drive new material, posting links to works in progress from his next album as The Streets, and weep about a tree that fell onto his roof. Even more intriguingly, he recently posted the revelation that: “Toilets in KFC always smell like Spanish hotel rooms.”

Slash (twitter.com/slashhudson)
The guitar legend posts progress reports from the recording of his solo album, due next year, and tales of jam sessions with the likes of ZZ Top and Ace Frehley. He's also designing a new guitar as a tribute to Les Paul.

Tinchy Stryder (twitter.com/tinchystryder)
The number one grime star is constantly chatting to fans on his page and offering excitable snapshots of his newfound success: “Asked for apple juice @ the interview I had and all these cakes came with it still....da hotel is flee'd up!!” whatever that means.

 

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