Why PiNG sort of Pongs…
“This is our store. This what it looks like with people in it!” - Steve Jobs
Or, this is our beautifully restored temple of worship and this is what it looks like full of the grubby fingered great unwashed, who hopefully have credit cards circling around the iPads… And here’s iTunes, with an overwhelming number of people, including “friends” that you know have terrible taste, bugging you to buy some Jack Johnson or at the very least check out some new act called Lady Gaga.
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Yesterday, like every other geek-clined MacBook-toting digital denizen, I watched Steve ‘iGod’ Jobs present the much trailed nu-new-future for (the) music (business). Like every other nerd-it-all tweeting twerp, I shared a few gut reactions of mild dismay from my heretical BlackBerry. In the dewy light of day, here are a few further, less surface thoughts to throw on that flaming hype heap…
KILL ‘EM ALL AND LET JOBS SORT IT OUT
The surprising thing about yesterday’s announcement was on how many different fronts Apple appear to be fighting to dominate. From social networks to web tv to trad bricks & mortar retail, every single arena (apart from search and email?) seems to be in their sights.
Netflix was one of the few alliances announced but everything and everyone else of note, had a target slapped on their backs. From a comment about “amateur hour” (YouTube) to the lack of invention in an age of shoddiness in photography (Canon et al), the Q4-marketing-prelude felt oddly aggressive. Isn’t fighting on all fronts how most empires lose focus, over extend themselves and fall?
SOCIAL + MUSIC
This, deflatingly, is nothing new. FaceParty, one of the original social networks, was people congregating around a love of music. LiveJournal was obsessive fanblogs about musicians and diaries proclaiming what audio miserablism was soundtracking the overt/cryptic angsty outpouring of typed strife. Friendster had Interpol and Har Mar “involved”. And then there was MySpace. Hell, even the website I started a decade ago in my bedroom, is a music community. And, of course, then there’s Twitter, where musicians are now statistically bigger than leaders of the so-called Free World. Put it all together and PING, the lightbulb moment this is not…
Clearly, the once bright dead star that is the Murdoch-owned MySpace may seem the most obvious parallel for a music-centred community but a lot of the functionality, of presenting personal charts and sharing your loves, has been done incredibly well by Last.fm. A lot of the feed functionality also looks a lot like the somewhat clunky, flog-it-to-your-friends pyramid scheme-ish mFlow and quite blatantly like Facebook, which doesn’t limit your sharing and loves to “just” music. These “social” bells and whistles, feels a bit like Apple awkwardly following the class of ‘06, rather than boldly leading the way.
I guess the main problem (for people like me, which I accept isn’t their core target market) is that this wasn’t iTunes launching a Netflix for music. This wasn’t “buy an iPod, pay a tenner a month and fill yer boots!”
DISCOVERY?
Shudder. In an era of Spotify, where the unfettered exploration process leads to discovery, Ping alongside iTunes seems somewhat antiquated. Even if Napster 2.0, Wippit (RIP), Comes With Music, etc didn’t explode, the all-you-can-eat and subscription-style packages are the future of the business of music. Sadly, the ‘record’ business is holding this reality back.
Pop (aka the commericial music business) will choke on its longtail. Every “social” music service lives and dies on the quality of the service. Without those who are passionate about music, sharing their loves and, also, buying hundreds/thousands of tracks, t-shirts and tickets a year, you just have an person-to-person echo chamber for major label marketeers. How anti-internet and conflicted with the creative culture Apple stands for, is that?
I wonder if I can use Ping to link to Spotify playlists? Or if they’ll “do a MySpace” and not allow links to competitors such as Blogspot, Paypal, etc…
I LIKE ALL MUSIC… EXCEPT COUNTRY, DEATH METAL AND COLDPLAY!
Really? I had to sit through that “agreeable” plod from ‘97?
“PiNG”
Another aside but it isn’t a particularly pretty, Apple-like word. Is it really necessary to name a sub-function of iTunes? Was it just an excuse to poke Microsoft Bing? Mixed with a knowing nod at the original instant messenger ICQ and iPhone-competitor’s BBM (BlackBerry Messenger - one of the most marketed functions by RIM this year) where you “ping” people for their attention by making their screen wobble or smartphone vibrate ? And, possibly a glance at the hacker community as you could and probably still can, ping people’s IP addresses to knock their dial-up connection offline. Like a lot of yesterday’s #stevenote, the name feels disruptive, rather than the work of visionaries.
THE VERDICT
It will work and be an overnight massive success and dominate because it’s Apple and they already have 160 users credit card details. And deep pockets from all those iPods, iMacs and MacBooks they’ve sold, jettisoned by the brand-enhancing “cool” from the ambience of music-makers and film-makers and people wot create things but don’t and will make nearly as much as those who aggregate or create the devices their creativity is consumed on.
Put it another way, if iTunes was The Beatles and MySpace was Nirvana*, iTunes 10 seems less like Wings or a modern mash-of-art like The Grey Album but more like GirlTalk, taking a bit of everything, which seems like fun when you first hear it. For a shortwhile you’re high on this whirlwind feeling but the winds of change don’t seem to be a’blowing. In the cold light of day, it just seems like a mish-mash without any of the suss or detail. Why not collaborate rather than replicate and try to monopolistically dominate?
Mostly, Ping is disappointing as, for all Apple’s groundbreaking resources, it seems dated and a little short-sighted. In the short-term it seems eager to please the agreeable mass who’ve never heard of Last.fm, who will lap this up. Long-term, the passionate people you need to make a successful music career or social music service that relies on shared taste to truly work, isn’t the passive people who already own the Coldplay’s greatest hit(s) and buy 5 albums - or more likely 20 tracks a year.
Ping seems like a decent enough baby step forward for the masses but I fear, a few years from now, a monopolized self-service music world where passive consumers are left wondering which party the cool kids are at…
* = Napster was Little Richard or Public Enemy? HypeMachine Kanye? Twitter…? This is a whole other blog post.
