iTunes Ping: huge potential for music discovery, rough around the edges

September 3, 2010 by Bill Palmer

iTunes Ping is the first social network for music lovers that actually has a chance to succeed in the mainstream, and for a few reasons. The first is that it comes from Apple, a company the mainstream increasingly trusts to deliver usable, understandable, non-geeky products. The second is that a ton of people already have iTunes on their computers, which means that Ping gains the benefit of being app-based from the get-go. That gives Ping the potential to be much more polished and sophisticated the comparatively clunky web browser interfaces that even the top social networks like Facebook and Twitter suffer from. Most social networks don’t bother to launch a full featured desktop app because they know that most users won’t download and install it no matter how superior it is to the crappy web browser version. But in Apple’s case, the past several years the company has spent getting iTunes placed on not only all Macs but many or even most Windows PCs, by making it an integral part of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad experience, is now paying off in an unexpected manner. All of the above having been said, Ping is still very much in the early stages of something that could be the next big thing.

I love the concept of Ping in iTunes 10, but man is it ever raw and rough around the edges at the moment. It should have been labeled beta for now, in my opinion. But no one outside the geekdom wants to use anything while it’s in beta-test, and if Ping only attracts geeks, it’l never get off the ground. Ideally, Ping is 92% about music, 8% about social networking, so it needs mainstream (non-geek) users to get involved from day one, which means pushing it out there in an “official” capacity now even though it clearly hasn’t yet become what it has the potential to be.

The majority of my Ping stream is currently along the lines of “so and so is now following so and so” with the remaining minority of my stream being actual music-related items. When that ratio is reversed (and it presumably will be once the current land-grab is over), Ping will be a useful tool for music lovers.

Still, there are other early hiccups. Other than right-clicking on my own name in Ping, grabbing the URL, and making my own bit.ly link, I have no idea how to tell anyone how to find me on Ping. The lack of a unique username or custom URL means that most Ping users will have no idea how to tell their friends on Twitter or Facebook or email how to find them; this will inhibit mainstream growth until Apple decides how to deal with it. For a minute there we thought Facebook was integrated into Ping, but that turned out not to be the case.

There’s also the fact that Ping isn’t initially doing such a great job of analyzing my musical tastes. The ten artists it wanted to automatically display on my profile, while all coming from my iTunes Store purchases, were in no way representative of my purchases overall. How can an artist I’ve only ever purchased one song from make my top ten list, when there are other artists I’ve purchased dozens of songs from didn’t make the list? I ended up making my own manual list, but found that even I couldn’t accurately depict the breadth of my music collection with a mere ten album covers. And I was tempted to blame my three-day-long inability to upload a profile picture on my own sometimes-flaky home internet, until I heard another Ping user say that she was having the same problem. Now I’m not sure. Based on the fact that most users do have profile pictures, it doesn’t appear to be widespread.

Some indie artists have already begun (rightfully) complaining that musicians can only be listed in Ping as being musicians (as opposed to just being any other end-user) by invitation. My stance is all that artists who sell music through iTunes should automatically be allowed to have an artist account in Ping. I heard from one indie, still under-the-radar artist today who has in fact been invited into Ping, so it appears Apple is already opening things up to artists beyond the Lady GaGas of the world. To me it looks like a staggered rollout in that respect, which goes back to the fact that this feels like Ping Beta without the “Beta” label. Perhaps Apple merely didn’t want to turn on the full floodgates on the artist side until it got a sense of what the floodgates on the end-user side are going to look like. If so that’s fine. But within a few weeks at the most, Apple should begin allowing all artists who sell their music in iTunes to join the party without an invitation. Any longer than that, and it becomes unfair to the artists.

It’s been pointed out that the lack of a web browser-based interface means that Ping users will struggle to access their accounts while at work (where they can’t install iTunes) or on someone else’s computer (where they might not want to log into iTunes at the expense of logging out the owner of the computer). This is a valid point. But I feel like with crappy web browser interfaces for social networks having become such an ingrained (and unfortunate) norm for both the geeks and the mainstream, Ping’s success is going to depend on being able to break users of that habit – and if that means initially making Ping only accessible through iTunes itself, then so be it. Six months from now, after the early adopters have gotten used to the idea that using a social network can actually be done through a real desktop app instead of a lame approximation of one in their web browser, then there will be no harm in launching ping.itunes.com as a browser based way of participating in Ping on some level.

As for now, I’ve found myself thinking long and hard these past few days about the notion of my iTunes experience, which has always been a very private thing for me, suddenly becoming public knowledge. I frequently interview musicians for Beatweek Magazine, and those interviews are as much a reflection of my musical tastes as anything else – so if anyone should be used to having their musical tastes plastered out there in public by now, it ought to be me. And yet even after publishing hundreds of musician interviews, which I generally conduct for the sole reason that I like the music and want Beatweek’s readers to know more about the artist behind that music, even I’m finding it a foreign concept to think that the public will now know about it whenever I purchase a song in iTunes. But that’s a good thing. Why shouldn’t you guys be able to see what music I’m buying? Why shouldn’t I want you to know what I’m buying?

The more I think about Ping, it’s a concept that I wish Apple had introduced into the iTunes Store from day one, years ago. But perhaps it’s something that had to wait until now, when even decidedly non-technical people (and in some cases even non-social people) are fairly comfortable with the idea of being part of a social network and sharing what’s on their mind. As of this week, that concept now finally extends to music on a (potentially) mainstream level.

If successful, Ping has a fascinatingly open window right now to corner the market – and not just because it’s part of iTunes. Facebook’s music efforts have largely been misguided while Twitter has never even really tried, and all of the music-specific social networks up until now have been so decidedly geek-oriented that the mainstream has never even heard of any of them. Ping could even finally, official kill off the abandoned amusement park known as MySpace which far too many musicians still inexplicably try to use as a promotional vehicle, even after most of the general public has long since vowed not to set foot on MySpace ever again for any reason.

Finally, it’s interesting to me that while Microsoft’s “Bing” is just a terrible, terrible name for anything, Apple’s “Ping” sounds like a decent name for a social network despite rhyming with Bing and only being one letter off. Is that because Ping really is that much more of an acceptable name than Bing, or is it because Microsoft’s long history of comically horrible product names has led us to simply reject every new product name Microsoft comes up with?

And come to think of it, am I the only one who finds it interesting that Apple’s latest product is called Ping and not iPing?