Ten Reasons Why Ping Is Currently Useless To Music Fans

It just goes to show how accomplished a salesman Steve Jobs is with his introduction of Apple’s iTunes-based social music network, Ping, this past Wednesday. From the way Jobs presented the service, many people felt Ping was the future of music consumption and interaction, calling it a “Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, <insert internet juggernaut here> Killer.” In fact, I believe my initial reaction during the presentation could be paraphrased as “gave me an erection.”

It turns out that all anyone got out of Ping so far was a severe case of blue balls.

If you’re a music fan and you’re wondering if Ping is worth your time, it’s not. You’re much better off with Pandora or last.fm right now. They offer music discovery options that make Ping look like BP of music sites. Don’t bother signing up if you don’t have an iTunes account. If you are already signed up, I guess it couldn’t hurt to opt in to reserve a name/profile just in case Apple improves the service, but no one would blame you if you didn’t care.

In it’s current incarnation, Ping is utterly useless for music consumers and here are ten reasons why:

1. It doesn’t help you discover music in a meaningful way.

According to Apple’s own page for Ping, music discovery is the chief goal of the service. If that’s the case, why are there so few opportunities to discover music?

The first thing your eyes gravitate on the Ping welcome page is a section Apple calls “Artists We Recommend You Follow.” Great, new musical artists to discover! Then you realize that the artists “recommended” are some combination of 50 Cent, U2, Lady Gaga, Diddy, Daddy Yankee, and Keith Urban. By now, if you haven’t realized that this section is just a list of major label artists populated by a iTunes content manager and not actually personalized to you, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

It doesn’t get any better when looking through the profiles themselves. Artists or friends alike, the only components of music discovery on a profile are a static ten song/album list and a ten song/album chart generated from the top purchases of people you “follow.” If we drill in a little further, that list of ten musical selections on your profile is either done automatically through scraping your previous purchases or manually. I think it would be safe to say that automatically picking out ten of your previous purchases is not the best way to represent your musical tastes or discover others’. The best thing to do right now is manually pick out ten of your favorites, but it can be time consuming to update and with the small userbase, there’s no incentive to do so unless you like the flashbacks to picking out your “top friends” on Myspace years ago.

Let’s say you manage to find a cool friend or artist and want to listen to their recommended list of ten. You can’t even listen to complete songs! The best you can do is listen to a 30 second preview. Can you name a time when a 30 second preview has ever been a good way to discover music?

Where’s the dynamic list of songs someone’s listened to over the course of the last year (last.fm)? Where’s the suggested artists or songs based off of what you like (Pandora)? Where’s the ability to listen to actual music?

2. It only works with songs sold in the iTunes store.

If you want to use any of the “social” features of ping, such as “liking” or commenting on a piece of music, it has to be done within the limitations of music in the iTunes store. That cool unsigned artist you’ve been listening to on repeat? If they aren’t on iTunes they may as well not exist. Oh, the same goes for The Beatles, AC/DC, or any other artist that refuses to sell their wares on iTunes. I bet those guys were nobodies anyway.

Let’s take this one step further. How many people do you know purchased their entire music collection on the iTunes store? I don’t know about you, but I barely know anyone who’s bought more than a handful of tracks lifetime on the iTunes store. These are what most Ping profiles are going to be populated with: handfuls of novelty singles.

Sounds like a great way to discover new music, huh?

3. It requires client software.

Despite the huge install base of iTunes across the globe, it’s still a fraction of music lovers with internet access. Without a browser-based implementation of Ping, the growth potential of the network will be severely stunted. Let’s also not forget that it’s a pain in the ass to share links to profiles or content when an external application is required to view them.

I own multiple Apple products and even I find iTunes a necessary evil to transfer content to them. Having to run a separate piece of software just to access a website is both insulting to its users and a crippling annoyance.

Sure, you can argue that it’s a business decision by Apple to get people to use their products. But a social network is not an iPhone 4. It’s only as useful as the people using it. And it certainly isn’t doing any favors for me or many of the people already “in the Apple family.”

4. It’s already full of spam and noise.

Within a day after its launch, I was already seeing multiple spam accounts commenting on artist pages and featured profiles with links to “free iPhone 4! click here!!!.” Not exactly the scintillating music discussion I was looking for.

Now, let’s give Apple the benefit of the doubt and say that they’ll figure out how to filter out the spam effectively. There’s still the problem of profile noise.

Right now, every piece of activity on the site constitutes its own “post” on your profile. So whether you follow someone, like a song, purchase an album, write a comment or review, it’s all jumbled together into one cluster of spam. There’s no easy way to separate out the important activities (writing a detailed comment) from the mundane (following 134 individual bands). Why bother adding to a conversation if it’s just going to be buried under an avalanche of irrelevancy?

5. There’s nothing to do on the service.

Seriously, there’s nothing to do right now on Ping once you’ve set up your profile. Since listening to or discovering music isn’t in the cards, what about starting a conversation about it?

You could, but it’s a bit kludgy. You can’t make a post or a comment without doing it from a piece of content being sold on the iTunes store. You can’t post pictures or video from that time you met limp bizkit, nor can you write up a concert review of that great Staind show in Biloxi last night. Well, I guess you could write a comment under the iTunes page for “Outside”, but it’d be akin to writing your memoirs as a Youtube comment. In other words, not possible.

I suppose you could put down that you’re attending an upcoming show, but whats the point? There’s no incentive to do so other than to notify the world that you could be robbed more easily that night.

Where’s the interesting stuff like shared playlists? Hell, just include that one feature and you already have enough music discovery/sharing activity to warrant signing up for the service!

6. It’s a restrictive way for artists to interact with fans.

Artist Profiles are a little more useful than “normal” profiles in that they can post videos, pictures, and text without referencing a potential iTunes sale. However, other than posting content and a listing of upcoming tour dates, they’re not much better than a normal profile. Artist Profiles are still limited by the same spam and feed noise pitfalls in engaging with their fans.

In fact, once the initial hubbub of Ping dies down, I can’t think of a good reason why a band would want to regularly update its Ping profile once it’s up. Without a way to import content in from other outlets, I can’t see bands devoting the resources to provide original content on Ping when they could do it so much better on Facebook, Twitter, their own sites, or even Myspace.

7. It does nothing better than any other existing service.

Artists can disseminate media and tour dates better on their own website. Fans can interact with each other and their favorite artists better through twitter or tumblr. Music lovers can see what their friends are listening to better on last.fm. They can discover music through listening to full songs on Pandora or even FM radio. Concert goers can meet up through message boards, Facebook, or even last.fm with greater ease.

So tell me, what exactly is Ping good for, other than act as an interactive advertisement for $1.29 iTunes songs?

8. You can’t listen to full length songs.

This was touched upon in reason #1, but it bears repeating. Any “music discovery service” that doesn’t allow me to listen to complete songs is useless.

Utter deal-breaker.

9. It’s a pain in the ass to find your friends.

Right now you have to manually put in your friends’ email address to follow them on Ping. Initially, Facebook Connect was enabled, allowing you to import your Facebook friends with a couple of clicks. However, due to some dickswinging on the parts of both Apple and Facebook, that feature was disabled.

It’s 2010. I don’t a) know everyone’s email address by heart and b) have any desire to manually type in emails for any reason whatsoever.

10. It’s a pain in the ass to get set up as an artist.

Mashable brought this up in a recent post, but it makes sense why there’s so few artist pages up on Ping right now. Apple’s going through a laborious process by having artists apply for “artist profile pages” and going through each one approving them.

Come on.

We’re not even talking about curating Apps here. It’s going to take weeks if not months for Apple to get all of the artist profile applications sorted out. And for what? So your band can have a restricted social media network platform for a limited userbase?