Nutty Mobiles

We review GhostTown, a music discovery app for Android that has a neat trick up its sleeve

With all the recent fuss about Google’s cloud-based music service and Amazon’s similar Cloud Drive app, the concept of streaming your record collection to your phone is fast becoming a reality. In a few years time it’s conceivable that your mobile won’t need a cavernous SD card to store your tunes, and instead they’ll be obtainable simply by grabbing them from ‘the cloud’.

In the meantime, there are other ways of getting songs on the move. Spotify and Last.fm both offer streaming – but at a cost (unless a Windows Phone 7 user, the latter is free). Unsurprisingly, other developers have cooked up ways of undermining these popular services, and GhostTown is probably the most ingenious yet.

GhostTown is billed as a ‘music discovery’ application but in fact it’s more akin to a vast library of tracks you’re able to stream at any given time. You can listen to pre-created play lists that highlight the most popular acts in particular genres, or you can search for an artist directly from the app’s menu.

Initially, it seems almost unbelievably generous – any act you can think of is available, and it doesn’t cost a penny to listen to individual tracks or entire albums. The app is ad-supported and these can be removed by upgrading to the ‘pro’ version, but it’s not essential as the adverts are relatively unobtrusive.

%%break%%

Alas, like all things in life, if something does seem to be too good to be true, that means it probably is. GhostTown may offer a world of music free of charge, but in fact it actually has a rather sneaky method of supply those tunes. The app is actually stripping the audio stream from videos on YouTube, thereby avoiding the tiresome process of actually getting the permission of the copyright holder or record company.

This is clearly a loophole, which is there to be exploited, and the developers of GhostTown are to be applauded for being so resourceful. Sadly, there are hiccups in this process. Because the app searches YouTube for song titles, you’ll often find that your selected track is actually a cover version rather than the original.

Another problem is the speed at which the audio streams – even over a solid 3G connection, the pauses in-between songs are large. However, once the stream begins it’s fairly decent.

If you can live with these issues then you’ll find this download to be something of a revelation; practically any artist you can think of is at your fingertips. The only question is how long YouTube will allow this app to exist – although it’s not technically breaking any rules, we can’t imagine that the copyright holders and record companies are going to be too thrilled with people consuming their wares without having to pay any cash.