9to5mac:
Apple’s upcoming Beats-based streaming music service will likely be named “Apple Music” and will have deep social networking integration for artists, according to industry sources briefed on the plans for the new service.
Taking a page out of the discontinued iTunes Ping feature from earlier this decade, the service will allow artists to have their own pages within the streaming music service that they can use to post track samples, photos, videos, and concert updates.
I liked the idea of Ping. Where it fell down was in implementation. Adding social to an app is tricky. Like the ability to design a beautifully crafted device, creating a social network requires insight and experience, as well as an intuitive sense of what and how much people want to see and share. In that regard, Ping was a swing and a miss.
Reading the 9to5mac piece, I get the sense that Apple is building a promotional vehicle for artists, more than a social network for the rest of us. Is this the right approach? Looks like we’ll find out in a bit less than a month.
Spot on description of Ping. The first time I saw it I knew it was doomed. It smelled like a dead product before it even got off the ground, and I think that odor was apparent to almost everyone, which really hurt its implementation.
I didn’t think it was doomed, until I realized they were never going to expand it to all artists, even movies, tv etc. or any of the other lala.com features.
if they had expanded it, things might not have fallen apart. But they launched it and then let it die like an untreated wound