With global app sales estimated at about $25 billion by the end of 2013 and an emerging industry involving thousands of independent and established developers marketing all manner of services and products as apps, it is hard to deny the growing importance of software applications for smartphones, mobile computing platforms and other technologies (i.e. cameras, televisions, cars, etc.). Apple’s ubiquitous slogan, “There’s an App for That”, is not just a self-congratulatory tagline; it is a comment on how thoroughly infused many everyday activities have become with applications.

Although apps are merely the latest iteration of the software commodity, their increasing integration into leisure, commercial, educational, interpersonal and other spheres signals an emerging “app culture” that deserves closer scholarly scrutiny.

In this talk, I suggest some theoretical groundwork for understanding apps as “cultural software” that carry and create “atoms” of culture as they display and represent media objects and environments (Manovich 2008). I focus on a particular instance of app culture: the case of music and the distribution of albums as apps (e.g. Bjork’s Biophilia album). Ultimately, the app-ification of music makes clear that the full capabilities of this digital format have yet to be realized and that the limitations that come with music – and other media – as software involve significant tradeoffs for the circulation and consumption of cultural goods.