This is a quick review of the Ping service that iTunes launched
- iTunes has plenty of information about what I listen to and what I buy, and yet there are no recommendations from the start. Even their lame genius feature in the store attempts to do this.
- Finding people isn’t tied to twitter or facebook, but emails addresses. So, I’ll never try to find anyone.
- The artists you can follow are lame. I’m not interested in them, and I already don’t follow facebook pages because I find the updates to be inane usually. I am interested in these people because of the art they create, not their photos of them on tour. Unless you’re Tom Waits. I’ll follow him on any network.
- There is also no artist sign up so local/small bands won’t be on it. This will not aid in music discovery, or bringing smaller artists recognition. What a waste of an opportunity.
- It is completely tied to iTunes, and what if you listen to music they don’t sell? Then you have no way of sharing that with your friends.
*All of the above opinions are subject to change based on user adoption, and improvements to the service Apple makes, but it looks like I will continue to use last.fm and just asking my friends in person about music.
Why is apple so bad at paying attention to independent artists? They do a decent-ish job with indie developers…
from Jason Smith
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