Update: the original version of this piece failed to identify Clintprints.com as the website for poster artist Clint Wilson. We regret any confusion the omission may have caused.
Rock Show, the music poster marketplace developed especially for Apple’s iPad by Neutrinos, received an update in the iTunes App Store Wednesday that should help the Portland-based startup gain recognition for its innovative business model as well as for the creative designers behind the posters in its inventory.
Rock Show leverages the iPad’s screen real estate to deliver high resolution views of limited edition fine art print concert posters from artists and designers such as Darren Grealish (The Killers, Stevie Wonder, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Lee Scratch Perry) and Lil Tuffy (Dead Weather, Sonic Youth), which makes it a nice vehicle for showing off the iPad’s graphics chops.
Users can also buy posters from within the app, a model Neutrinos founder Rob Banagale hopes will make Rock Show the best digital marketplace for art prints in history.
“Nailing this idea has meant discussions with designers and careful design for users,” Banagale said. On the designer side those discussions led to the creation of a dealer backend for the app that allows designers to upload and maintain which of their posters are made available while also tracking their sales and inventory. “The posters are made by individual artists and design studios from the United States, Canada and the UK,” Banagale explained, saying, “Some of these folks do their own printing and many of them handle shipping posters personally.”
Other designers featured in the Rock Show lineup include Jay Vollmar, who did the Gogol Bordello poster in the gallery here, Clint Wilson, who did They Might Be Giants and Green Day, and James Flames, who did The XX.
Designers with work not shown here but well worth checking out include strawberryluna and Mexican Chocolate Design.
“Gig poster designers are passionate and entrepreneurial people,” Banagale said. “Given Apple’s history with music, we thought giving people a vehicle for engagement with digital art seemed like a great fit.”
While users can now buy posters for themselves using the app and can share them with friends by sending scaled down images in email, Banagale sees future iterations of Rock Show including a system for tracking and displaying user favorites, new sharing options, a brand new interface and, of course, more posters. “We built this software in Portland coffee shops and living rooms,” (prior to the iPad’s release), he said. “It is hard to explain how difficult it was to develop without an actual device in hand.”
Now that 1.3 is out and early bugs have been addressed, user feedback and the continued synergy of promoting success for poster designers give Rock Show’s developers optimism for the future, though not without some challenges. “We see the challenge being that people are conditioned to buying digital media and apps using just their iTunes password,” Banagale admitted. “Shipping real-world goods means we have to make users feel at home getting their credit card out rather than using Apple’s easy payment processing system.”
Click on individual posters in the gallery to see higher resolution images. Rock Show is a free app for iPad, available now in the iTunes App Store.
