iTunes Ping
iTunes Ping, or Ping, launched this September to so much fanfare that I was reminded of last year’s Google Wave launch. However, like Google Wave iTunes Ping is an interesting concept that is proving difficult to execute.
Ping, not to be confused with the social network manager Ping.fm, is a software-based music oriented social networking service that is deployed and operated by Apple, and allows users to follow and interact with friends and artists. Ping was released as part of iTunes 10 and can only be used on the music player. The service launched in 23 countries and has gained over 1 million members so far.
When Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announced Ping he explained the service as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes…[except that] it is not Facebook. It is not Twitter. It is something else we’ve come up with. It’s all about music.” This is definitely true, and Ping’s list of features includes the ability to see follow friends and artists to see what music they like and what concerts they are going to. Users can also post reviews of music, the songs they’ve purchased, and see custom song and album charts based on their own networks. Artists can also post videos and photos for fans to enjoy as well. According to Apple’s Ping announcement, Ping is based around the idea of social music discovery. Social music discovery is great, and I loving using tools that facilitate it, however I’m not too sure that that’s actually what Ping does.
There are already great tools that can be used for social music discovery: Pandora, Grooveshark, Last.fm, MySpace Music, and Slacker, just to name a few. And, while Ping does attempt to meld some of the best aspects of each into its Ping offering, Ping is really more about buying music and driving sales than sharing or enjoying music itself, although the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. The thinking seems to be that since each piece of music you share is connected to the iTunes library, when one of your followers sees your shared song they will click the button right next to it to buy what you’ve promoted. The same idea goes for Ping’s concert section. Now, these aren’t bad ideas, and they could help drive sales for more relatively unknown bands in the future (assuming they have a Ping artist page in the first place, but we’ll talk about that in a moment), but this whole set up isn’t necessarily about discovering new music, or about sharing that music for a few reasons.
First of all, the songs listed in Ping are iTunes samples and not full songs, making it difficult for users to fully explore artists’ music. Secondly, Ping assumes that the people in your social network know great new music that you haven’t heard of. Since Ping doesn’t suggest artists or individuals for you to follow based on your current iTunes library and relies on you to follow people based on their name or email address (you can also find people to follow on an artists’ page), you’re looking mostly to your own contacts (at least at first) for suggestions. This is fine, but not everyone’s friends have great taste in music. A third problem is that even if your network does have great taste in music, many of your network’s favorite artists may not be listed on Ping. Right now mostly mainstream artists are listed, with very few independent acts being represented on the social network. This may change in the future since Apple is in the process of inviting artists to Ping via their iTunes distributors, but this also brings up a fourth problem – Ping’s closed system. To have an “artists” page in Ping you must be invited by Apple. This is a problem since even though all artists are verified it makes it much more difficult to involve smaller acts into the network. Additionally, since artists are the only ones that may post pictures and videos to connect with their fans, this works to exclude newer and smaller artists from that part of the process. Aside from the artist aspect, Ping is only available on iTunes and not online, so you must have that program running while using it. Ping is closed off from other social networking applications like Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, as well. Ping is an island in the social networking sea and is only as good as its users’ participation – which is fine, as long as there is actual participation. However, Ping doesn’t exist in a number of countries yet, effectively sectioning off the kind of music users can be exposed to.
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