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AUSTIN, Texas — Michael Jackson is no longer with us, but the spirit of his younger self lives on in the Zoozbeat Jackson 5 Remix mobile app for iPhone, slated to be announced Friday morning at South by Southwest. The app’s creator, Zooz Mobile, makes a suite of music-creation apps for the iPhone that have impressed us with their precision and versatility, but what makes this one special is that it includes fully licensed stems for five songs from the band’s heyday.
To make it easier for non-musicians to remix the songs, the developers reduced the parameters of control, so that if you tap a certain part too early, the app waits until the proper beat in the song to play it.
“We’re basically making GarageBand functionality available on a phone, but with professional recorded music in it,” Zooz Mobile President and CEO Scott Geller told Wired.com.
The app costs $5, which is what you’d pay for non-remixable versions of the same tracks, and that investment could pay off in more than just sheer entertainment value. Once you get the hang of it, you can enter your remix to win a slice of the prize money the company is offering for the best entries as voted by users — $1,500 for the best one and $250 to each of three runners-up. Each winner also gets a Jackson 5 prize pack consisting of a hoodie, a bag and a T-shirt, as do 30 honorable mentions.
For the label and publisher, selling a remixable version of these songs (”ABC,” “Dancing Machine,” “I Want You Back,” Mama’s Pearl” and “The Love You Share”) represents a new way to get paid for old music while offering fans something they can use, instead of just consume. Because this requires a new type of music licensing similar to that of using a song in a film, details need to be hammered out on a case-by-case basis before remixable songs can be released.
“This is basically the Super Bowl of licensing — we have EMI Publishing on one side, which owns [sync rights for] the Jackson 5 songs, and then Universal Music Enterprises, which includes the Motown catalog on the masters side,” said Geller. “It’s kind of a new thing — there is coordination between what you see on the screen and the music, but it’s not a sync license in the traditional sense of a movie or something like that.”
With the music licensing out of the way, Zooz Mobile engineer Mark Godfrey turned each isolated element of the song (Michael Jackon’s lead vocals, his brothers’ back-up harmonies, guitar parts, bass and drums) into discreet modules for users to activate or deactivate, essentially painting them into the track with their fingertips. To prevent the user from creating something unmusical out of the samples, the app helps out with timing, so that everything stays in sync.
“You don’t want to have every section of the song in there, and every possible loop, so we had to go through [and choose],” said Godfrey. “Especially when you have a three-guitar song like ‘ABC,’ you have to choose which one you want to use.”