Ten features we want in the Lady Gaga iPad app

As you may have read, Lady Gaga‘s upcoming album ‘ARTPOP’ will be accom­pan­ied by some sort of app.

She’s written quite an extensive note about it here. (We like the bit where she says digital music is over­priced then goes on to say she’d like to work with Apple.) Anyway she explains among other things that it’ll work across various platforms, but it seems fair to assume that its natural home will be a touch­screen tablet.

So here are some features we have decided are vital to the success of the ‘ARTPOP’ app.

1. A song that never ends
Let’s have a song — let’s called it ‘The Infinite’ — which just goes on forever. It would be like our amazing 45-minute version of ‘Alejandro’, but would last a lifetime. Fans would stage events all around the world where they listened to ‘The Infinite’ for days, weeks, months on end. One fan, whose Twitter name would probably have ‘HausOf’ in it somewhere, would actually devote his entire life to listening to ‘The Infinite’.

2. Angry Madonnas

3. Telephone
This is basically Skype-type func­tion­al­ity built into the app, but you can’t call anyone with it. What’s the point? Well, imagine browsing the ‘ARTPOP’ app one day, when the music suddenly drops out. A message appears on the screen. ‘GAGA CALLING’. You press ‘answer’. And on the other end of the line is Lady Gaga. She’s called for a chat! After a few minutes she says her goodbyes. That would be pretty incred­ible. We suppose this feature has a bit of a ‘golden ticket’ element to it. We reckon Gaga would need to make one call a day for this feature to be useful. Maybe the audio from each call could instantly be published to the user’s Littlemonsters.com page?

4. A song that changes every time you listen to it
What you’d be wanting here is something like this Gwilym Gold album, but confined to one song only because a whole album that didn’t know if it was coming or going would probably get on your tits after a while. The important factor here is that Lady Gaga should never release ‘her’ version of the song — there should never be a defin­it­ive version. The song should be regarded as an organism.

5. A sound­board
A simple way to play out famous Lady Gaga phrases. “Paws up!” “I was born this way!” “I will look you in your eyes and tell you that I am not dumb enough or moronic enough to think that you are dumb enough or moronic enough not to see that I would have stolen a melody!”

6. The full album somehow bundled with the app
In her note about the app Lady Gaga said that it would have a similar price to an album. We’d be happy for this app to go for something like £9.99 as long as it included some sort of con­ven­tional download of the album’s sound files, otherwise fans are going to effect­ively buy the album twice, and surely that’s not what Gaga or her man­age­ment have in mind. SURELY.

7. A song that is com­pletely personal to each and every listener
Let’s say the song is called ‘I AM ARTPOP’. This is a bit like the sug­ges­tion in point four, except the random factor is removed. Instead, the listener inputs various inform­a­tion about them­selves — their date of birth, their house number, their lucky number, their eye colour, their shoe size or whatever. The app then uses this data to generate a com­pletely unique version of ‘I AM ARTPOP’ for every listener. It’s their personal version of the song. The song can be exported to be used as ringtones, doorbell chimes and so on. It’s offered to the world com­pletely copyright free; Gaga takes no ownership of the music as the music essen­tially belongs to the person whose life pro­grammed the song. Naturally there would be some sort of place probably on Littlemonsters.com where you could upload your song, download other versions and so on, but it would be important that there is no way to vote for a favourite, to click a ‘Like’ button or whatever, because all fans should be regarded as equals etc etc.

8. All the bits of all the songs
Acapellas, drums, synths, more synths, a deranged choir, the sound of a vacuum cleaner being thrown through a patio window, the whole lot. Play one bit, play everything except the lute solo, tinker to your heart’s content. This is fairly standard we suppose but it would be good anyway.

9. The ‘I don’t speak German but I can if you like’ trans­la­tion feature
This includes sound­files of various key phrases — “where is the train station?”, “if you’re a strong female you don’t need per­mis­sion”, “twelve frank­furters please, I wish to wear them as a hat”  trans­lated into German. Useful if traveling abroard. (Specifically to Germany.)

10. InstGagaram
Take a picture of someone and apply a series of filters — ‘rendered in Word then pho­to­graphed on a laptop screen for texture’, ‘meat dress’, ‘Kermit shroud’ and so on.

Look we know it’s not reas­on­able to expect all of these features but if she could sort out six or seven we and she could have a ‘Pad romance.