Love them or hate them, the Black Eye Peas are on some other stuff when it comes to their creativity. Their new iPhone application takes things well beyond the average app. Not only can you listen to their music and follow their tweets, but you can actually interact with the band members in a 3D virtual world. Most interesting is their 3D video, which puts you in the middle of the action.

The video for the song “The Time: The Dirty Bit,” puts you in the center of a dance party with the Black Eyed Peas and a bunch of fans. (An iPhone 4 is recommended to get the full effect with no jitters). As you turn around while looking at the screen, you are surrounded by dancers and the band members. You can pan left or right, all while the video is playing. It’s like Google Street View filled with hot dancers, but in video.

“It is so not video,” says will.i.am, “that is so 2008. You cannot even compare it to yesterday. It is something brand new.” This is only the beginning as Will.i.am is launching Will.i.apps to create a platform for other artists to create immersive experiences around their music.

The status of the music industry has been in question for a while now. New technologies are overshadowing old business practices. Artists are selling more music online. Will.i.am goes on to say “The concept of an album is dead. What the hell is an album nowadays? This allows artists to add more layers onto that 4-minute song that is audio only. Songwriting changes.” His view is that, rather than sharing music the way we do now, as a simple collection of songs, artists will need to add dimension to the music and provide an experience beyond just listening. He also touches on the fact that the technology will actually influence how the music is written and created.

To illustrate this to me, he starts to sing, “as she was walking down the hallway and she seen that little girl and I told her to turn left—you can do all that and turn left—and I look up to the sky and saw the rainbow—you can look up at the sky in the app. You couldn’t do that yesterday, it was linear. Now it is directional. If I knew we were going to do this app when I wrote the song, I would have wrote the song totally different.”

Many artists are looking for the way to promote themselves in this new world of music. How do you add value? This is definitely an awesome way to touch your fans. I’m just wondering when the Android app is coming out. Grab the app for $2.99 on iTunes.

via TechCrunch