Mark: How Would I Improve Ping?
Wouldn’t be hard. Apple sure did launch a half-baked idea. Here’s what I wish Ping was:
- Curated channels/stores that people could subscribe to (ie: itunes.com/yvynyl) that also give us a percentage of the revenue for hustling your wares.
- Custom playlists and mixtapes, goddamnit. How hard is that?
- Make all this accessible outside the clunky, heavy, slow iTunes app.
- Don’t try and figure out what I like based on what I bought. I haven’t purchased music in iTunes… um… ever. But I have ~150GB of well-metadata’d MP3s in the app across two computers. Last.fm can see that, why can’t you?
- Do NOT suggest I follow Lady fucking Gaga, Katy Perry and Linkin Park. Fuck you.
- Speaking of following, I typed in “Grizzly Bear” and it came up with no results. Um, what?
- Let me import my Twitter, Gmail and Facebook. C’mon, this is 20-freaking-10, isn’t it? I’m not going to ‘invite my friends by email’ you idiots.
- Open the music selections to include indie artists outside the iTunesland. If an artist isn’t on iTunes, why don’t YOU invite them?
- Data, data, data. Expose it! Its fun! Speaking of which, why didn’t you just buy Last.fm from CBS?
- Try, at least a little bit, to encourage and engage in the JOY of music… I know this is hard for your megacorporate cold, dark little hearts, but my god, this place feels like fucking Walmart more and more every day.
I’m sure I’ll be adding to these thoughts. What about you, dear reader? What else do you wish this was or will become?
For someone working in tech/music, it’s probably uncool to admit that until now, I haven’t looked at what Ping does. Heck, haven’t even updated iTunes. Also, I didn’t watch the keynote and didn’t read a lot of tech blogs today and from what Mark writes below, I won’t even bother checking it out.
Here’s how I find music today: Find a song you like on Tumblr and SoundCloud powered by ExFM, check out Hypem and then go find the album on Spotify, move to my To Listen folder and hit play. Additionally: get the vinyl version from a store, the mp3 version from Amazon (or iTunes, yes).
Nice rant, brother.
