iPhone App Reviews

Silly Songz

Michael (Admin) | Apr 8, 2009 Music

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Email greeting cards have been a pretty huge industry since the day when environmental hero Al Gore invented the internet, but for some reason audio cards never really caught on. Spazzles is trying to change that, but instead of adding a personalized recording to a greeting card image, they’re adding that personalized recording to the end of a goofy song instead.

Silly Songz is a semi-schizophrenic collection of original music that’s half nice and half craaaazy, and you get to append a 15-second recording to the end of the song you choose. Some of the nice songs deliver messages like don’t be sad, get well, I love you, etc. The crazy songs are far less kind and deliver messages like you’re dumped, quit calling me, let’s golf and drink beer, and my personal favorite, “I got diarrhea”.

When you send a song to someone, they get an email with a link to a single Quicktime file that plays your song (typically 30 seconds or less) and  your recorded 15-second message on the sillysongz.com website. First the song gets played, and then your message plays when the song ends. The Quicktime player shows an audio progress bar but no visual which I find a little disappointing. Yeah, I’ve already acknowledged that traditional audio cards have more or less flopped in the greeting card space, but c’mon now… looking at something is better than looking at nothing! At least throw a logo in there.

On the plus side, the quality of the recordings in Silly Songz is great and there are lots of them… by my count there are 37 songs in all, which is enough to cover a lot of situations and/or just-for-the-hell-of-it jokes.

Much like the music selection, though, Silly Songz seems to be geared towards two entirely different audiences. Most of the songs sound like they’re recorded with kids in mind, but the inclusion of songs like “Yer a piece of s..t” kind of precludes you from handing this app to your child for some musical playtime.

I like the idea behind Silly Songz and, for the most part, I like the technical execution in selecting a song, adding a recording, and then emailing it… but I think I’d like this app a lot more if it would split itself into two different apps, one aimed at children and another aimed at grownups.

Just listening to the songs without emailing them could be tons of fun for the kiddies… and a lot of the songs included in this app are perfectly fine for them… but adults would probably get a bigger kick out of these audio greetings if they were edgier and even weirder than some of them already are. Think Stephen Lynch, that comedian whose entire act is built on songs like “I Think You’re a Nazi” and “If I Were Gay“. I’m not saying Spazzles should call up Stephen and hire the guy (he’d probably cost a fortune) but adult-oriented greetings would become so much more viral if they had that kind of edge to them.

Overall Silly Songz is a good app if you like the musical style and the messages they convey. Not all of the songs are silly, but a lot of them are and that’s what makes the app fun. At the same time though, not all of the songs are for kids… and not all of them are for grownups… and that’s where I think Silly Songz could use the most improvement.

Tags: $3.99, greeting cards