The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App
Dave Dederer, former singer and guitarist for nineties hitmakers The Presidents of the United States of America, has fashioned quite a second career for himself as the vice president of business development for Melodeo …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is an early chapter in the short-lived 'album as app' experiment. Melodeo, the Seattle startup where former Presidents guitarist Dave Dederer had already been building a music service around iTunes playlists, turned the band's catalog into a native iPhone app in February 2009 — barely months after the App Store opened and well before streaming economics settled. The move put a nineties act directly on Apple's new distribution rail, with the label role compressed into a single download.
First-order effects
- The Presidents' catalog becomes purchasable as one iPhone app through Melodeo, giving the band a direct App Store storefront and Melodeo a marquee artist to prove its platform to other rights holders.
- Fans get multi-album access in a single purchase, sidestepping per-track iTunes pricing at exactly the moment the App Store is establishing what consumers will pay for bundled mobile content.
Second-order effects
- Other mid-tier and legacy acts face pressure to follow suit or risk ceding the nascent app-store shelf to early movers; developers and startups like Melodeo gain a pitch template for signing artists who want app-based distribution without label infrastructure.
- Apple benefits twice over — the App Store gains a music category beyond games and utilities, reinforcing the rapid expansion of iPhone apps into every content vertical while keeping purchase flow inside Apple's 30% cut.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the album stops being a retail unit and becomes software — a bundle updated, priced, and merchandised like an app — foreshadowing experiments like the first location-aware album app two years later and, eventually, artist-facing data tools such as Apple Music for Artists.
- Distribution power consolidates around platform owners: whoever controls the app marketplace controls music discovery and margins, a structural shift that outlasts any individual album-app and shapes how artists negotiate with platforms rather than labels.
The trend: Music packaging migrating from physical and per-track digital formats into platform-native apps, an early data point in the broader shift of creative distribution onto smartphone operating systems.