Chuck Fishman Feb 1, 2009

Michael, that sounds like a good idea. I do need to play with the Zune platform, and it seems like there is an area called ‘The Social’.

Just remember, it’s a lot easier when I am trying to sell my own music to point people to iTunes since the install base is so large, and also because people have more experience with it. In addition, my own music is easy to distribute to iTunes because of enablers like TuneCore. That’s why I was talking about the large audience at iTunes, and how more discovery and community tools would help artists and record labels sell more music and find new fans.

Also, I have to be honest - so far the Zune install process has been cumbersome; I was just going to try it out. I got an error - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949420?sd=zune - and I’m hesitant to do anything new to this laptop.

Jeremy Pepper Feb 1, 2009

Well, isn’t that one of the things that Pandora is supposed to be great at - discovery?

I’m not sure that Apple is the one to deliver community. While people love Apple - and the brand itself has a community of fans - there never has been a community from Apple (if that makes sense).

For me, I find music through various sites, and find that Ning has done a great job building communities around stars (or, well, the stars themselves are building the communities, such as Lupe Fiasco on Ning).

Chuck Fishman Feb 2, 2009

Jeremy - Thank you for your comment. When you wrote “there has never been a community from Apple” - you validated my overall point here.

I just re-read the Rolling Stone interview with Steve Jobs from 2003, and Jobs never once mentions discovery and community. And that’s the bulk of the music experience today - discovery and community. So just how visionary was he when it comes to digital music when he failed to identify those trends or build experiences like that into his products.

You mention that you find music ‘through various sites’. I do too, and I enjoy finding new music that way. However, I just wish it wasn’t such a hackneyed experience and that there was more cohesion around music discovery. Also I wish discovery would be more integrated with my music playback experience. I don’t always have the time to read 100 blogs.

Regarding community, I was talking less about the specific community around an individual artist, and more about the community experience regarding listening to music.

For instance if I listened to a Lupe Fiasco song, my music player, be it iTunes or otherwise, would tell me about the others in my personal network who are also listening to the song. And maybe even during playback of the Lupe Fiasco song, it would then point me out towards his communities.

Shruti Bhat Feb 27, 2009

I definitely agree that the discovery and sharing experience is a missing piece in the iPod/iTunes model. I envision being being part of communities that make music and video discovery simple and seamless and being able to check out what my friends are listening to in real-time and sharing a preview/recommendation of a song with one click.
I had an interesting discussion about this with someone from Apple recently and gained insight into the fact that there is very little flexibility in negotiating contracts with the music companies as far as sharing is concerned and what they have accomplished so far has been revolutionary. Of course, whether Apple will cash in on the social networking phenomenon is anybody’s guess. I personally hope its soon enough!