I was contacted by JR Higashi Nihon through Apple last week that I was infringing on their rights with the melodies. I immediately removed both applications from the AppStore to comply.

I have now started to negotiate some form of licensing with them, hopefully this will lead to something positive and the re-release of Yamanote Soundrop with an Official stamp of approval from JR (Well actually Jeki, the marketing firm in charge of their assets)

Update: Turns out they only want to license to Japanese Companies … how surprising. Expect frencaze.co.jp in the future I guess, after filling tons of paperwork in Japanese, if that’s even possible to make happen.

Yamanote Soundrop Lite was downloaded 10,000 as of yesterday, this is more than I expected.

The paid version, Yamanote Soundrop will reach 2,500 downloads today.

Background

Yamanote Soundrop is a very simple iPhone Application that plays the departure melody of the Yamanote Line. In Japan, most train stations play a melody when the train is at the station. The Yamanote Line is one of Tokyo’s busiest and most important commuter rail lines. Running as a circle, it connects most of Tokyo’s major stations and urban centres.

The application was implemented in order to try and understand the process of releasing an application in the App Store and figure out the timing and other details.

Analysis

It was rolled out to the App Store on March 11th. Because of the time difference and some caching issue with the App Store, it actually took an extra day to really see sales ramping up.

It peaked around 120 per day for a few days, basically while it was in the “new application” section then dropped quickly. Fortunately that quick burst at the beginning was good enough to put the application in the top 100 overall in Japan and so it kept selling at a rate of 20 per day for a few days until it dropped out of the top 100.

On March 30th, a Japanese Blogger twitted about the application and brought quite some traffic to my website. The application was then selected by Apple to be put in the New and Noteworthy section of the App Store. Front Page, pretty exciting moment.

The application actually stayed in that front page for the entire month of April. It then moved to the second page of New and Noteworthy on May 1st.

Still during the first 2 weeks, it was selling at around 50/60 per day.

And once on the second page it went back to a 20/30 per day rate, which eventually I’m guessing will go back down to less than 10 a day.

Free vs. Paid

Yamanote Soundrop Lite, the free version which only contains 4 different melodies and does not allow the user to pick and choose the melody, was released on the App Store on March 19th.

It got downloaded around 150 times on the first day, then bumped up to 450, 500 for the following 3 days then established itself at a rate of 200 a day, eventually settling down to 100/130 lately.

What’s interesting is that within the free application there is a link to up-sale the paid version, and apparently the release of the free version had no impact on the sales of the paid version.

Overall both applications have been downloaded 11,560 times, and Yamanote Soundrop Lite is getting close to the 10k mark which is more than I expected.

Download PDF: by_the_numbers.pdf