Interview: Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem talks iPhone music games

Tapulous is one of the biggest success stories on iPhone’s App Store, with more than 25 million downloads of its Tap Tap Revenge music games. The company already works with artists and labels to sell in-app tracks in Tap Tap Revenge 3, while it has also launched premium spin-offs for the likes of Coldplay, Lady Gaga and The Dave Matthews Band.

Now it’s branching out further with a new game, Riddim Ribbon, whose first incarnation was released this week. It’s a musical racer that sees players rolling a ball down a ribbon in time to music, with three tracks from the Black Eyed Peas preloaded, and the ability to buy others from Tiesto and Benny Benassi via in-app payments for £0.59 ($0.99 in the US) a pop. The game came from a conversation with Black Eyed Peas mainman Will.I.Am.

“In the last six months, he’s been really involved,” says Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem. “He’s really a co-producer of the game, and his instincts around how to build a great product are really dead-on. He got excited in particular by the idea of users being able to discover the music, but also change it and make their own version.”

In Riddim Ribbon, that idea manifests itself with different remixes of each song, which players are able to shift between by taking different paths on the track – effectively creating their own mash-up as they play. Decrem admits it was challenging securing the necessary rights for this feature – it’s more complex than just licensing single tracks, even for ’same-song mash-ups’ like those in Riddim Ribbon.

“As these things become more popular, where gamers start engaging with the music and interacting with it more creatively, there’ll probably be a shift in industry practices,” says Decrem, pointing out that more artists and labels are signing buyout rights for remixes, allowing them to be used for licensing in games without requiring the approval of the DJ. In this case, Tapulous’ strong partnership with label Interscope helped – a relationship that also led to it offering a free MP3 remix download for all US buyers of the game, via the iTunes Store.

Riddim Ribbon isn’t a one-off game for Tapulous, though. “The vision we have is that Riddim Ribbon becomes a music game franchise much like Tap Tap Revenge,” says Decrem. “We want to build a franchise, make the game mechanic better, add a social layer and then release multiple versions over the next 12 months. As a company, we’ve never been just about putting out an app then moving onto the next one.”

One thing Tapulous is doing well at the moment is the in-app commerce in Tap Tap Revenge 3, having reduced the game’s price to free just before Christmas, a couple of months after it started selling tracks as downloads within the game. The effects have been startling, as Decrem explains.

“We announced in December that we had sold one million songs in Tap Tap Revenge in the first two months, but then between 20th December and now, we have sold several times over that,” he says. “In three weeks, we sold 100,000 copies of Ke$ha’s Tik Tok alone in Tap Tap Revenge. At a time when a number one hit maybe sells a couple of million copies, to move 100,000 copies through our game shows that in-app commerce is real.”

Decrem has an interesting theory about the App Store, saying people shouldn’t look at it as a catalogue of apps, but instead as an entertainment destination.

“The closest thing to the App Store in my opinion is YouTube,” he says. “Every day, millions of people go to YouTube and the App Store to see what’s new. They’re basically checking stuff out. Most of it they will ignore, some they will tell friends about, and some they will play. To do in-app commerce, you have to rise above that first ‘try things out’ level. You have to cross another barrier for people to keep coming back – you have to engage them over time, and convince them your app is going to be here to stay.”

Some Tap Tap Revenge players have spent upwards of $100 buying music in its in-app store, which represents pretty strong engagement. Decrem also thinks that the best lessons for engaging people in this way will come from social games firms like Playfish and Zynga, who’ve been refining the model in their Facebook games.

By way of an example, he cites the fact that some Tap Tap Revenge players have spent upwards of $100 buying all the music in its in-app store, which is a pretty strong commitment to the franchise. If you think about it, all this applies just as much to non-game artist apps: perhaps labels should be looking to see what they can learn from the Zyngas of the social gaming world when planning their iPhone app strategies.

“2009 was the year that Playfish, Playdom and Zynga figured out the playbook for the web – how to acquire, engage and monetise users,” says Decrem. “But in the next two years there will be a Zynga moment in mobile where we connect all the dots, and you’ll see companies worth a billion dollars in this space too. The real challenge in the App Store is about using push notifications, building a list, engaging your users and then using your app to promote other apps. We’re figuring out the playbook for mobile.”

Tapulous hasn’t released details of its actual revenues, although there were reports before Christmas that the company was bringing in more than $1 million a month. Decrem says merely that the company has been profitable for some time, but does explain that Tapulous is focusing on several separate revenue streams, rather than one single model.

They include in-app advertising from its deal with AdMob, promotional campaigns with big brands and movie studios, premium game downloads, the in-app music commerce, and other in-app virtual items like clothes for avatars – something Decrem says could be more lucrative than the advertising in the next three months. “It’s a combination of all those things that allows you to monetise every user,” he says. “It’s not just about one revenue stream.”

For now, that monetisation is likely to remain on iPhone and iPod touch, although Decrem says Tapulous is keeping an eye on Android, and is excited about the potential for its music games on Apple’s upcoming iPad tablet. “At the end of the day, this is about mobile, in 2010 that’s still dominated by the iPhone OS,” he says. “We’re quite bullish on Android, and believe it will do well, but it will take most of 2010 for Google to really connect everything.”

Meanwhile, Tapulous is also working on tools for artists and labels to create their own content for its games, rather than rely on the developer to do it for them. No details have yet been announced, but it will build on the launch of 12 label channels in Tap Tap Revenge 3 over Christmas, which Decrem says have gone down well with players.