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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

You don't get it. Ping is only there to drive up music sales. This is why every single page has Buy buttons. And why the focus is mostly on music from the store and not for example your ripped music is scrobbled.

This is not about music fans. This is a controlled environment to sell more music.

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Sure, but to sell music you need to sell it to fans. You can't just make a page with a buy button on it, call it a social network and expect it to increase revenue.

Either Apple have something up their sleeve or they're being terribly naive.

I think if you're Apple, you probably could create a blank page with a Buy button to increase revenue.

He does get it, you don't. Apple needs to actually make a useful product if they want to sell music through Ping. This miserable turd they have forced out is unbelievably bad and will not drive up music sales at all. Instead, it's bringing the sanity of a respected company into question.

I "got" the reasons why Apple didn't integrate with the leading rival social networks.

But bearing in mind they've got their own piece of software that'll tell them everything you listen to (and how often) and a library full of albums for sale by those artists, any halfway competent product manager would have made recommending albums by these artists their absolute #1 priority. Complete with big "buy" button.

Judging by the authors screenshots and lists of bands it sounds like they've released with the Cuil of music recommendation engines.

For a company whose attention to detail is legendary, that's embarrassing.

My experience with recommendation engines (mainly Pandora) is that they're not yet good enough for rabid fans, connoisseurs, and musicians. You get bands that are trying to be like some great band, but not quite doing it. What you're left with is a bunch of imitators that you don't want to listen to, which results in hearing music that makes you sick of the one band you did like in the first place.

It really depends on the type of recommendation engine being used. Pandora tries to match by sound - matching similar sounding works. Other engines rely on people and the relationships that are formed based on what everybody likes. The problem with these recommendation engines is that new music (in this case) really need to be seeded first before they'll start showing up in lists.

Yep, the fact that it's only interested in my iTunes Store-bought music makes it utterly useless to me. I still like CDs, and when I go for MP3s instead iTunes is rarely the best deal.

Do they think Ping's going to persuade me to pay over the odds for digital music and give up on CDs??

I'd say they expect that at least some people will. If Ping were to take off (in the modest sense of people actually activating it and occasionally looking at it), I would expect it to drive up iTunes sales. I don't like that it would drive up sales, but I expect it would happen.

Unfortunate fact is, there are a lot of people out there (I'd say most of us, but to varying degrees) whose music taste is largely influenced by what they think it says about them to others. Music as a status symbol. And status symbols work even better when it's less apparent that you're actively trying to signal.

So if my stream updated automatically that I'd just listened to the new Arcade Fire album, problem solved. But if it doesn't, and I want to impress people by showing that I listen to it, and there's no way to do that on Ping except by buying it from iTunes... I think that would have an effect on a lot of people's judgement. Most of the time not enough to send you over the edge, but on an aggregate scale, often enough to bump up sales.

Again though, this is contingent on Ping taking off as a tool people actually use for music networking. If no one's looking, no one cares what they look like.

> But if it doesn't, and I want to impress people by showing that I listen to it, and there's no way to do that on Ping except by buying it from iTunes.

Actually, there is. In my opinion it is a very bad way to do so, but you browse on the ITMS to the music you want, click on the down arrow and click on Post. Then you can add a message and it will be appear on your Profile.

But as I said in my comment[1], they should have made all that accessible from within my library!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659902

Keeping this in mind makes me extremely grateful that it's only in ITMS and not in my library. I don't want or need another social network, least of all one welded onto my personal music collection.

Which is a win in my mind. I'm always out to find good music that isn't on the top 100 list. Connecting with people in an environment like this is great.

People make this out to be such a poor decision on their part, but it's incredibly convenient. Give it some more time and we'll see improvements.

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