This Day in the Rolling Stones is the latest app for music lovers of a certain age who want to find out exactly what Mick and the guys were up to every day of their careers. It wants to be all Hot Stuff) but ends up more like a Biggest Mistake.
Despite appearances, this is not an official Stones product.
The deeper you delve, the more that becomes apparent. Although there seems to be loads of stuff on offer in the menu, as a whole the app feels thin, not living up to what it could be.
The “This Day In…” section, for example, is really pretty dull. It tells you which gig the Stones played that day (they’ve done a lot of gigs) and suggests songs they might have been playing at the time, based on which tour it was and what their recent record releases were. But each and every day’s report is written in the same style, to the same format – almost as if it had been cobbled together by software, rather than a human being.
There are other types of notes, which tend to be a bit more interesting. They’re mostly news items – Mick did this, Ronnie did that, such-and-such a song was released. There are a handful of interesting gems, but on the whole they’re written in a very repetitive, dry sort of way which makes them hard to get through.
How about the “Song Notes” section? “Fifteen classic albums”, it says.
Wait, fifteen? That can’t be right. It isn’t.
A cursory look at Wikipedia says the Stones have released 22 studio albums, 11 live albums, and a bunch of compilations. Why do only a fraction of these appear in the song notes section? Your guess is as good as mine. Was it a rights thing? Or perhaps the developers couldn’t be bothered to include a full discography? Who knows?
The trouble with this is that a real Stones fan will notice all the stuff that’s missing immediately. And yet presumably the real Stones fans are precisely the sort of people this app is aimed at. I can’t imagine a better way to annoy them than charge money for an app they will soon notice is full of holes.
There’s more. There’s a quiz (I scored 5/10), there’s a page of links to Stones websites, there’s a trivia section which is as dry as the dates and illustrated with the same photo for every single trivial fact.
Ultimately this feels like a rather half-hearted attempt. Sure, there’s lots of information here and lots of stuff that obsessive Stones fans might enjoy, but it isn’t packaged or presented in a particularly compelling way, certainly not in a way that makes you feel you’ve got your three dollars’ worth. Not very satisfying.
Source: App Store
